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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Ontrack Disk Manager CD is intended to be used on systems which have a capacity limitation or in cases where the drive needs to be partitioned and formatted prior to installing the operating system. Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows 2000, Mac OS X and Linux all have the ability to partition and format a drive during the operating system installation, as well as overcome most current capacity limitations.

FreeBSD recognizes the Ontrack Disk Manager and makes allowances for it. Other disk managers are not supported. If you just want to use the disk with FreeBSD you do not need a disk manager. Just configure the disk for as much space as the BIOS can deal with (usually 504 megabytes), and FreeBSD should figure out how much space you really have. If you are using an old disk with an MFM controller, you may need to explicitly tell FreeBSD how many cylinders to use.

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.

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

Although Kaleidescape uses high quality hard disk drives, drives do fail occasionally. On average, drives in Kaleidescape Systems fail at a rate of one or two percent per year. To prevent loss of information from a drive failure, every Kaleidescape Server uses RAID-K to store redundant information. The 3U Server also features a Hot Spare Disk Cartridge as an additional measure of data protection.

When a hard disk drive fails in a Kaleidescape System, you will still be able to enjoy all the Movies and Music in your library, but the System will not be able to import CDs or DVDs. Your Kaleidescape System will also be vulnerable to losing data from a second disk drive failure, until the first failed disk drive has been replaced and the data on it rebuilt. If you suspect that a disk drive has failed, then always call Kaleidescape Technical Support first.

No, RADIUS was designed for individual PC use and certain configuration files will not work if the program is stored anywhere but the C: drive.

Goldmine, Symantec ACT! v.3: Both of these applications have problems with the OSR2 version of vredir.vxd. Goldmine and ACT! databases can become corrupt under OSR2. There is a Goldmine technical support document on the subject. (Courtesy Chris Grant). In both cases, the workaround is to replace the OSR2 version of vredir.vxd with the original release or OSR1 version of the same file.

Running a utility on a potentially corrupted drive puts your data at risk. A utility assumes that your drive is working at 100% both mechanically and electrically. If your drive is not performing at its optimal level, the utility will attempt to fix things that may not need fixing. The result is further data loss. Your best and safest course of action is sending your drive to Ontrack without delay.

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.

Note: By the ''geometry'' of a disk, we mean the number of cylinders, heads and sectors/track on a disk - I will refer to this as C/H/S for convenience. This is how the PC's BIOS works out which area on a disk to read/write from. This seems to cause a lot of confusion for some reason. First of all, the physical geometry of a SCSI drive is totally irrelevant, as FreeBSD works in term of disk blocks.

Kaleidescape recommends that all Disk Cartridges should be left in the Server until the replacement Disk Cartridge has arrived. Please do not remove a Disk Cartridge unless instructed to do so by Kaleidescape Technical Support. The Server chassis will cool properly only when all its slots are filled with a Disk Cartridge (blank or containing a hard disk drive).