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4 GB partition with FAT 16

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11 replies

by northwood

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I read in a book that you can create a 4 GB FAT 16 partition in Windows 2000

Is this True?

I thought FAT 16 can only work in a 2 GB partiton.

How is a 4 GB possible with FAT 16 ?

11 replies

by timthetoolman

Hi,

Its not possible using the native filesystem. I think the first answer was actually referring to 4Gb *drives*, not partitions.

It may be possible with a custom 3rd party filesystem add-on to increase the cluster size to 128 sectors/clusterwhich would allow for 4Gb partitions.

Take a look at the following Microsoft article on this.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q118335

(remove spaces from the above URL)

Here is a quote from that article explainingthe situation...

"The 2-GB partition limit is imposed by the maximum number of clusters and the largest cluster size supported by the FAT file system. The FAT file system is limited to 65,525 clusters. The size of a cluster must be a power of 2 and less than 65,536 bytes--this results in a maximum cluster size of 32,768 bytes (32K). Multiplying the maximum number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768) equals 2 GB."

Cheers,
Tim.

by fenaikh

Hi

Microsoft WinNT/2000/xp support the creation of primary partitions and logical drives of up to 4 GB using the FAT16 file system,but these drive are not supported by MS-DOS and Win95/98/se/me because the size limit for logical drives using the FAT16 is limited to only 2 GB in these operating system .In the otherhand Win95 OEM S/R 2 and later support drives larger than 2 GB using the FAT32 file system but not WinNT.
There are also limits bariers including BIOS,OS,file system and the type of HD controller.

The max number of clusters for a 16 bit FAT drive is 64K and the maximum cluster size for a FAT16 drive supported by MS-DOS and Win95/98/se/me is 32K which makes the max logical drive size 32K x 64K = 2048 MB = 2 GB.On the otherhand WinNT/2000/xp use a 64K max cluster size which makes the max logical drive size 64K x 64K=4096 MB=4GB

I hope this will help you.

Good luck

Mohamed

by fenaikh

To have more info in hard disk Size barriers pls visit this URl
Hard Disk Size Barriers
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/size.htm

***Very Important NOTE *********
After you copy the URL a space or a %20 maybe gets inserted in the URL when you paste it into your browser. Delete any spaces or such characters from the URL for the page to be loaded.

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