On 8 Apr 99, at 13:24, Chan Fan Chong wrote:

> I have a 3.2 HDD, I am intend to use NT as OS and would Like NT to read
> and write the HDD as a whole (just like Win98 use FAT32). How can I do
> it?

  I think you are asking how you can have the whole drive be a single
partition, right?

  You have two basic choices:

1.  FAT16
  NT supports 64K clusters, allowing a FAT16 partition up to 4GB in
size, rather than the 2GB limit in DOS, Win16 and Win 9x.

2.  NTSF
  NTSF is an alternate format, which can handle sizes at least into the
tens of gigabytes.  (One of the file servers I use has a 27GB NTFS
partition on it.)  Microsoft claims that this is more efficient than
FAT and less susceptible to fragmentation, but I like its file-by-file
permissions and its retention of separate "created" and "last changed"
dates.
  Without third-party tools, stuff on an NTFS partition is not going to
be readable with another OS.

  [If you specify NTFS when installing NT, it first creates a FAT
partition and then converts it.  This FAT partition is limited to 4GB
(per #1 above), but can be expanded after conversion.  Probably not an
issue with a 3.2GB drive, but some of us have 4.5GB or larger....]

  If you will be subjecting the machine to a lot of experimentation, it
may be easier to repair after crashes if you use a FAT16 boot partition
(so you can use DOS or Win 9x tools to recover).  This, however, will
be limited to 2GB, and so will not give you the single partition you've
asked for.


David G

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