On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:05:21 -0000, "Gerry Cornell"
Am I mistaken? The link you have provided deals with the timidities
provided with Windows 98.
File system structure is file system structure, irrespective of the
tools used on it. A tool that "breaks the rules" is dangerous,
because it goes out of compatibility with other tools and sows the
seeds for data corruption later.
The limits are cast in 16-bit stone for FAT16, but are conventions to
be ignored at your peril in FAT32. IOW, you physically cannot create
a FAT16 volume with more clusters than the 16-bit FAT can address
(though you may be able to force larger clusters with smaller FAT).
You may be able to force FAT32 to use smaller clusters on larger
volumes, resulting in larger FAT that can nevertheless still be
addressed by 32-bit addressing, but generally you would avoid this.
I thought new utilities come with Windows XP!
To be brutally hosnest, the tools that come with XP border on the
incompitent, where FATxx is concerned.
The partitioner is broken, in that while it tries to create FAT32
volumes > 32G, the process fails, leaving whatever was there destroyed
and no useable volume or partition because the volume is "too big".
Other tools can create FAT32 patritions and volumes as large as you
like; if there's a limit, I haven't hit it (up to 200G so far).
The disk maintenance tools suck rocks, for NTFS and FATxx alike.
Instead of the interactive (as in "no, I don't care if you think the
distant half of C:\WINDOWS is corrupt, DON'T truncate it") Scandisk,
you are forced to use DOS 5 era ChkDsk /F that blindly fixes without
prompting permission first.
AutoChk (which runs automatically after bad exits) is worse; there's
no "look, don't touch" mode at all - the *only* way it can work is in
kill, bury, deny mode (i.e. irreversably and often destructively "fix"
things, hide the details deep in Event Viewer where only a living OS
has any chance of ever seeing again).
All of this gets worse in FATxx, because the normal disk-checking UI
(rt-click, Properties, Tools, etc.) runs so quickly in FATxx volumes
that I doubt if it really checks anything at all. As it is, it seems
as if ChkDksk doesn't spot or fix invalid file names (i.e. those wierd
names that nothing can delete), which forces the FATxx user to
Scandisk from DOS mode and the NTFS user to... well, give up?
No-one's had their eye on the ball where these things are concerned,
and it shows. Most of us - myself included - worry more about malware
attack, and tend to forget about the natural risks to data.
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Never turn your back on an installer program
)