On a FAT32 File System to avoid fragmentation of directories without ever having to defrag the drive, no directory should hold more than 128 (8 sectors * 16 entries per sector) files / dirs. If the entries are long file name entries, it falls to 64 entries at the maximum.

NTFS offers a smaller cluster size (0.5) compared to FAT32 (4). This means more space for you. NTFS also allows compression and additional security features. Many people recommend formatting to a NTFS partition rather than converting the drive for speed reasons. You can go to this Microsoft article for more information, which lists only the pros . Some cons I've heard: Virtually no recovery tools for a faulty NTFS volume. If you backup this isn't a big deal.

Yes. There is always the possibility for data loss when upgrading your operating system. At a minimum, you should always backup your data before you make any significant change to your system.

Windows 95 OSR2 provides an updated version of the File Allocation Table file system called FAT32. This updated file system allows for a default cluster size as small as 4K, as well as support for EIDE hard disc sizes in excess of 2 Gbytes. FAT32 provides many enhancements over previous implementations of the FAT file system.

FAT32 is an older and more compatible file system but it has certain limitations, such as file size (maximum 4 GB). NTFS is more secure and has fewer limitations. The NTFS file system can only be used on Windows 2000 and XP. If you plan to use your drive on Windows 2000 and/or XP only, you may want to consider re-formatting the drive using the NTFS files system.

Versions of Windows95 older than OSR2, as well as any DOS version, operate on a file system called FAT16 (or FAT12 in some cases). The existence of large hard drives has led to large partition sizes, which mean large cluster sizes and wasted space: Under FAT16, a smaller cluster size is better, because a small file takes up a whole cluster if there is even one byte in it; the leftover space is called "slack.

Since you can no longer boot via F4 to an earlier version of DOS, the easiest thing to do is to run them on the DOS (ver 7.1) under OSR2. Neither OSR2 nor FAT32 should have any effect on the performance of your DOS games. However, see below in the bugs section about a bug involving the real-mode memory manager emm386.exe. For overviews of FAT32, see Microsoft's Market Bulletin on FAT32 and The Knowledge Base entry on FAT32. Yes. And Microsoft will also not support you (or at least not for free).

The FAT file systems can be exported, starting with the early 2.4 kernels, but if used extensively, it may cause grief. First, only those operations supported by the exported file system will be honoured. Operations such as "chown", "link", and "symlink" are not supported by these file systems, and will fail. Read/write/create etc., should be fine, as long as the files remain relatively unchanged.

There is no limitation for NTFS file; however for FAT32 a single file won’t be able to exceed 4GB. I safely removed HV355 from my PC and connected it to TV (while the USB cable is still connected to PC), but I am still not able to play the movies. HV355 will detect the signal and switch automatically according to the cable connection.

Older 486 motherboard BIOSes do not support IDE hard drives bigger than about 512MB; some older Pentium motherboard BIOSes (as recent as February 1996) do not support IDE drives over 2GB. If you run an IDE HD off such a motherboard, then you have to use a third-party disk manager to access the entire drive. However, these limitations have nothing to with FAT32, that is, if you can get FAT32 on the drive, it will work.

With the FDISK utility in OSR2. FDISK will only allow you to put FAT32 on drives larger than 512MB. Inside FDISK, you must enable "large disk support," to choose FAT32. After exiting FDISK and rebooting, FORMAT (use the OSR2 version only) the drive. NOTE that you must manually reboot after exiting the OSR2 version of FDISK, this is not automatic as in previous versions of FDISK. If you do not reboot between FDISKing and FORMATing, you will get strange-looking error messages.

PowerQuest has released one, as part of Partition Magic version 3.0. It is possible to "force" an upgrade of an existing Windows95 installation, and then convert FAT16 to FAT32 after installation of OSR2. See below for details. Case Study: On a 1.2GB drive, formatted as a single partition, before conversion from FAT16 to FAT32 (via Partition Magic 3.0), there was 58MB free space. After conversion, there was 268MB free space. Your results will vary.

Run DiskPatch > If you are not performing the operation on the first physical disk in the system, use the Set Disk command to select the disk (count zero based! So the first disk is 0, the 2nd is 1 etc.).

ReactOS natively supports long and unicode filenames. It is up to the file system driver how it deals with it. The FAT-driver delivered with ReactOS supports VFAT (=long names on FAT).

No - The operating system is sandwiched between FileVan and the drive system. Differences in drive systems are managed by Windows.

Yes it is possible and CleanCIH.EXE will take care of FAT32 partition also. For detailed procedure of using CleanCIH.EXE refer question 4 above.

There is a 4GB file size limit for transferring files onto your iRiver because of the FAT32 format of the iRiver disk. While this is not an issue for songs or videos converted for playing on the iRiver, if you also use it as a portable hard drive then you may hit this limit when trying to store high quality video files or VMware or Virtual PC files. Just thought I'd post this to help others as I hit this problem last week and it took me a few hours to find this answer on the net.

stated in their Product Descriptions, our #1-TuffTEST products have their own proprietary boot-loader and operating system. Therefore they can cold-boot a PC and troubleshoot its hardware without calling upon or interacting with the PC's native operating system. In fact, they can be used to troubleshoot a system with no operating system on its hard drive or even a system no hard drive installed.

A''' ReactOS natively supports long and unicode filenames. It is up to the file system driver how it deals with it. The FAT-driver delivered with ReactOS supports VFAT (=long names on FAT).

Yes and no! With FAT16 you can almost support any drive 64M to 2GB but we have 2 problems here. The first one that windows will format your 1GB drive as FAT32 unless you tell it to use FAT16. This is more work for your customer and it is degrading for your product. The second problem is that what is your customer may use a media that is larger than 2GB? 2GB sounds like a lot but this will not be the case in a year or two.

Begin the install of OSR2. Proceed until you are asked if you want a startup disk. Answer yes, and follow the instructions. After the startup disk is made, cancel the install. Now you have a bootable floppy with the new version of FDISK, FORMAT, etc, to do with as you see fit. You can also make an OSR2 startup disk if you have: 1) any version of Windows95 installed on your system, 2) the OSR2 CDROM and 3) A floppy disk.

Right click on the drive icon in My Computer or Windows Explorer. Choose properties. You should see a screen like that at right. The "Type:" line should indicate FAT32.

No. Interestingly, if you use FAT16 with OSR2, and you try to run Compression Agent, you will get an error telling you to install Plus!. Let me know if you can find a workaround other than installing Plus!. My question to Microsoft: Why did you guys put Compression Agent in OSR2, and then disable it in this way? Seems misleading to me to include a component in OSR2 that (on purpose) doesn't work.

For most users, FAT32 will have a negligible performance impact. Some programs may see a slight performance gain from FAT32. In other programs, particularly those heavily dependent on large sequential read or write operations, FAT32 may result in a modest performance degradation." Basically, the more clusters on your hard drive, the slower the performance. This is true for any file system, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, HPFS, whatever.

Yes, the only difference is the hard drive of your DVR cannot read in other PC. NTFS is designed to secure your data from unauthorized access. The recorded video data retrieved from an FAT32 hard drive and can be played in other (NTFS or FAT) PC. ?top???? Many users forget to install this driver, causing the application to function abnormally. You can download DirectX from the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.aspx ?top????