Saturday, May 3, 2008

What is FAT32?

A disk file allocation system from Microsoft that uses 32-bit values for FAT entries instead of 16-bit values used by the original FAT system, enabling partition sizes up to 2TB (terabytes). FAT32 first appeared in Windows 95B and is also found in Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0.

In order to overcome the volume size limit of FAT16 while still allowing memory-constrained DOS real-mode code to handle the format, Microsoft decided to implement a newer generation of FAT, known as FAT32, with 32-bit cluster numbers, of which 28 bits are currently used.

In theory, this should support a total of approximately 268,435,438 (<>

The maximum possible file size for a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte (232-1 bytes). For most users, this has become the most nagging limit of FAT32 as of 2005, since video capture and editing applications can easily exceed this limit, as can the system swap file. data recovery

32-bit File Allocation Table File System Not the same as VFAT or FAT, which are both 16-bit file systems.

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