UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

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Chapter 4—SCSI and IDE Hard Drives and Optical Drives
• Because of the more efficient storage methods of FAT-32,
your files will use less hard disk space. FAT-32 is not supported
by Windows NT 4.0 or earlier, but is supported by
Windows 2000.
• Note that a FAT-32 drive cannot be directly accessed by older
versions (pre-OSR 2.x) of Windows 95, Windows 3.1x/MS-
DOS, or any other operating system. If you occasionally need
to run older applications that cannot run under Windows
95B or Windows 98 and you want to store those applications
on a hard drive, be sure you create a hard drive letter that
uses FAT-16. This way you can boot your older operating system
and still access your program files. You can, of course,
access data on a FAT-32 drive over a network with any computer
using a compatible network protocol.
Figure 4.14 Adding a hard drive above 2.1GB in size to an MS-DOS or
original Windows 95 computer forces the user to create multiple drive letters
to use the entire drive capacity. The logical DOS drives are referenced like
any other drive, although they are portions of a single physical hard disk.
Benefits of Hard Disk Partitioning
Even though it might seem like a lot of trouble to partition a single
physical hard disk into multiple drive letters, especially with FAT-
32, several good reasons exist for both FAT-16 and FAT-32 users to
partition their hard disks:
• Multiple partitions can be used to separate the operating
system, application programs, and data for
easier backup and greater security—This method for
dividing a hard disk into C: (Windows and drivers), D:
(applications), and E: (data) is recommended by PowerQuest