>David George wrote:
>
>Can you recommend a good source of information regarding HD formatting
>(FAT16 vs FAT32). Also is it possible to set the cluster size on a FAT16
>drive to 32k?


David:

If you want to view FAT16 v. FAT32 information online, I suggest you go to the Microsoft Knowledge Base and read the relevant articles.   A very good place to start is ARTICLE # Q255867 "How to Use FDISK and FORMAT to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk" which is located at:

  http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q255/8/67.ASP

This is essentially a hypertext article with numerous links that provide background to various FAT16 and FAT32 issues, and how to set up your drive.

Cluster size on FAT16 volumes is determined by the size of the volume. Essentially, FAT16 provides for a maximum of 2**16 (or 65,536) clusters per drive volume. To obtain a 32-KB cluster, the volume size must be between 1024 MB and less than 2048 MB. But once you get over 4KB sized clusters on a Windows-based system, these larger units of storage become inefficient since they are more likely to contain slack space (unused portions of a file's last cluster, where no other file can be placed).

FAT32 is more robust and uses hard drive space more efficiently. However, files on a FAT16 volume can be more quickly accessed because of lower overhead (both FAT systems link their clusters -- FAT32 has to track down more cluster locations to retrieve the same sized files -- and fragmentation occurs more quickly).

FAT32 is usually only available to drive volumes which are 512 MB or larger, but you can force any FAT32 capable Windows version to use FAT32 on smaller drives by using the undocumented FDISK switch:

        FDISK /FPRMT

You will not get the prompt asking if you want large drive support. When creating partitions, FDISK will state that the drive is FAT16 by default and ask if you wish to use FAT32 instead.

HTH.

Regards,

John Chin

P.S. The new semester is beginning so please excuse my absence.


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