Hi, Rich.
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but your thinking is still faulty, I'm
afraid. We could just let it pass, but, since you DO want to learn...
That's where my thinking was faulty. I always thought that a FAT
could not see a NTFS but just the opposite was true.
No! FAT does NOT see at all.
I look in my driveway and I see a Ford and an Oldsmobile. I can use either
of them that I choose. But the Ford can't use (or see) the Olds and the
Olds can't use the Ford - that simply is not the way it works.
On my hard drive, I have some volumes formatted NTFS and some formatted FAT.
Since I'm running WinXP, I can access any of those volumes. I'm running
WinXP from Drive D:, which is formatted NTFS, but it is NOT correct to say
that NTFS is accessing ANY drive. It IS true to say that WinXP is accessing
those drives. WinXP is "seeing" and accessing both NTFS and FAT volumes.
One FILE system does NOT use another file system. Only OPERATING systems
use file systems. Operating systems are things like MS-DOS, Windows (many
versions from 1.0 through XP, with Longhorn on the way), Linux, the various
Apple OSes, etc. File systems are FAT (File Allocation Table - several
versions, depending on how many bits are used to locate the allocation unit,
which dictates how large a volume can be handled), NTFS (the New
Technologies File System, first used in WinNT), and other file systems used
by other operating systems. The operating system runs the whole computer,
including writing to and reading from hard and floppy disks; volumes on the
disks may each be formatted to fit one file system.
See this chapter from the online version of the WinXP Pro Resource Kit:
File Systems Overview
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_tdrn.asp
(That URL may not hit the exact right page, but you can do some exploring
from there. Lots of good information all through that chapter.)
If you really want to learn more about this stuff, you might want to buy the
hard-copy Resource Kit. It's expensive ($59.99 list from Microsoft Press)
and about half of it is stuff that I (and probably you) don't need to know
(how to roll out WinXP on thousands of computers in your multi-national
company, for example). But the half that does apply to me justifies - for
me - the cost of the entire book.
RC