UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

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Chapter 4—SCSI and IDE Hard Drives and Optical Drives
Converting FAT-16 Partition to FAT-32
If your existing hard disk uses FAT-16, you can convert any partition
on it to FAT-32 if one of the following is true:
• You have Windows 95B or above (OSR 2.x) and PowerQuest’s
PartitionMagic v3.x or newer. PartitionMagic has a FAT-
16–to–FAT-32 converter, which can also reverse the process
(FAT-32 to FAT-16).
• You have Windows 98. Windows 98 comes with its own FAT-
16–to–FAT-32 converter, and it can also use PartitionMagic
version 4.x or newer.
NTFS Considerations and Default Cluster Sizes
New Technology File System (NTFS) is the high-performance file
system that can be used on Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems.
It has much more efficient storage by default than FAT-16,
but it can’t be directly accessed by other versions of Windows or
MS-DOS. NTFS in Windows 2000 also supports encryption and the
merging of several physical drives into a single logical folder.
Use the following guidelines when considering the use of NTFS:
• Windows 2000 can install a drive of any size recognized by
the BIOS as a single NTFS volume up to the limits of the BIOS.
• Windows NT 4.0 must partition a drive of over 4GB into at
least two drive letters because its boot drive cannot exceed
4GB.
• Windows 2000 can be used in a dual-boot environment with
Windows 98, but if it is installed on the same hard drive partition
as Windows 98, NTFS cannot be used.
• NTFS drives require special disk utility programs for defragmentation
and disk maintenance because their internal
structure is different from FAT-16 and FAT-32 drives.
The default cluster sizes for NTFS in Windows 3.51 and above
(including Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000) are listed in
Table 4.22.
Table 4.22 Default NTFS Cluster Sizes
Drive Size NTFS Cluster Size
512MB or less 512 bytes
513MB–1024MB(1GB) 1024 bytes (1KB)
1025MB–2048MB(2GB) 2048 bytes (2KB)
2049MB and larger 4096 bytes (4KB)