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.

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.

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.

There is nothing unique to OSR2 which fixes problems in earlier versions of Windows95. Bugs in earlier versions of Windows95 are either: Not fixed by any means, and also not fixed in OSR2. What is unique to OSR2 are new features & capabilities such as FAT32, APM improvements, Bus Mastering support, PCMCIA enhancements, CDFS enhancements, MMX support, etc. See Microsoft's Market Bulletin on OSR2 for a complete list.

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 largest partition you can create with these Disk Managers is 2.1GB. If your HD is larger than this, and you are using a Disk Manager, you must use multiple partitions. If your MB BIOS is dated Jan 1996 or older, you may have to use a Disk Manager to access all of an IDE HD larger than 2.1GB. See this Knowledge Base Article for other issues with Disk Managers.

You have a CD with all of the OSR2 files except the setup program ("setup.exe"). This CD is distributed by some large OEMs with complete systems. The idea is, you have all the OSR2 files, in case you want to add or remove OS components, however, you have no setup.exe file, so you can't install OSR2 on another system. However, if you copy all of the files from the CD onto a hard disk, and then copy dossetup.bin, oemsetup.bin, oemsetup.exe, setup.exe, setup.txt, suhelper.bin, and winsetup.

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.

The APR - (Annual Percentage Rate) is a federally required calculation of what your rate would be if you rolled all your cost into your loan. In other words, if we took all your cost of getting into the home (with the exception of your down payment) and rolled it into the interest rate. Please keep in mind that the APR is NOT how your payment is calculated. The APR will come on your Truth-in-Lending (TIL) disclosure, and quite often the APR is higher than the actual note rate.

A 'Motherboard' is the main circuit board in a computer. It is into this board that the CPU (Central Processing Unit) or 'processor' is plugged. The CPU is the part of the computer that processes information and carries out all calculations.