Fat32 Question?

Question

I hope this is understandable. Someone will be traveling and using a business software program to communicate with the home office. She was told, something like this, She needs Fat32 on a device in order to do this. Does this mean she needs a , example, a usb storage drive that has (1) an OS with a Fat32 partition with that business software program on it? If so, then can we use the same OS prod key for the storage device? Why are they asking for Fat32? Am I missing the understanding of what she wants? Thanks, If you have any specific questions [e-mail] . Thanks for any help

Answer 1

Windows has two different "layouts" for how information is formatted on a hard drive. The older layout is called FAT32. It is used by Windows 95, 98 and ME. They can not read a device that is NTFS.

All versions of Windows NT use NTFS, the other layout, but can read a drive that is FAT32. The advantages to NTFS are that it allows for larger hard drives, and is more secure.

Windows 2000, XP and Vista are able to use either FAT32 or NTFS. By default they use NTFS.

It appears that if they are asking for FAT32, they must have some older PCs that are using versions of Windows which can not read NTFS.

If you are going to be taking an eternal hard drive, you will want to have that hard drive formatted with FAT32, and then whatever software or files needed added to it.

If you will be using a memory stick, thumb drive, jump drive (whatever name you want to use for it), then it is not an issue. They are always formated FAT32, as they are not (yet) large enough to use NTFS. So you would simple need to copy the program and other files onto the memory stick.

Easier way to be sure that the information will be accessible to you before you take your trip is to set up the hard drive or memory stick, and then attempt to access it from a Windows 98 PC. If you can, then you should be good for the trip.

Answer 2

This is an odd question... Fat32 is the data format used on some older hard drives... It shouldn't make any difference to executing a programme, especially a communications programme.
Unless to software is very old, or depends on very low-level access to the physical drive (for some strange reason), it should make no difference....and anyone who writs code that will only run on a certain drive format is buying trouble for their users... Fat32 went out of fashion some time ago, and will be hard to find on any newer devices

Installing an OS on a Flash drive would be futile, since few machines will boot from USB.

I think you may have some questionable information...
You probably need to contact the support line for the software manufacturer and clarify this.

Answer 3

Fat 32 is the file storage system that Microsoft used for Windows 98 and NT. They upgraded to NTFS file storage system with the introduction of Windows XP. Is your friend using a company computer or are they using their personal machine? If it is a work computer, she should have the company set it up properly before she leaves the office. If it is her personal computer, she will need a copy of either Windows 98 or NT to run the business software. Hope that is what you were looking for.

Answer 4

The existing File Allocation Table (FAT) file system was invented in 1977 as a way to store data on floppy disks for Microsoft stand-alone Disk Basic. Although originally intended for floppy disks, FAT has since been modified to be a fast, and flexible system for managing data on both removable and fixed media. In 1996, Windows 95 OSR2 came out with FAT32, a new and improved FAT.

A new generation of very large hard disks will soon be shipping, and the existing FAT data structures have finally reached the limit of their ability to support ever larger media. FAT currently can support a single disk volume up to 2 Gigabytes in size. FAT32 is an enhancement of the FAT file system that supports larger hard drives with improved disk space efficiency.

System Requirements: Fat32 cannot be downloaded and is only available with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98. To see which version of windows you are running, see our Windows Versions page.

FEATURES

FAT32 provides the below enhancements over previous implementations of the FAT tile system:

Supports up to 2 terabytes in size

Uses space more efficiently. FAT32 uses smaller clusters (e.g. 4kb clusters for drives up to 8GB in size), resulting in up to 5% more efficient use of disk space relative to large FAT drives. The below chart is an example of what the cluster size would be for the various sizes of hard drives as you can see a 32GB drive or larger will support the same cluster size as FAT16.

Drive Size
Default Cluster Size

Less than 512MB 512 Bytes
< = 8GB 4 Kilobytes
< = 16GB 8 Kilobytes
< = 32GB 16 Kilobytes
> = 32GB 32 Kilobytes

More robust. FAT32 has the ability to relocate the root directory and use the backup copy of the FAT instead of the default copy. In addition, the boot record on FAT32 drives has been expanded to include a backup of critical data structures. This means that FAT32 drives are less susceptible to a single point of failure than existing FAT volumes.

More flexible. The root directory a FAT32 drive is now an ordinary cluster chain, so it can be arbitrarily larger and located anywhere on the drive. In addition, FAT mirroring can be disabled, allowing a copy of the FAT other than the first to be active. These features allow for dynamic re-sizing of FAT32 partitions. Note, however, that while the FAT32 design allows for this compatibility, it will not be implemented by Microsoft in the initial release.

COMPATIBILITY

In order to maintain the greatest compatibility possible with existing applications, networks and device drivers, FAT32 was implemented with as little change as possible to Windows 95's existing architecture, internal data structures, Application Programming interfaces (APIs) and on-disk format. However, because 4 bytes are now required to store cluster values, many internal add on-disk data structures and published APIs will fail on FAT32 drives. Most applications will be unaffected by these changes. Existing utilities and drivers should continue to work on FAT32 drives. However, MS-DOS block device drivers (e.g. ASPIDISK.SYS) and disk utilities for these will need to be revised to support FAT32 drives.

All of Microsoft's bundled disk utilities (format, FDISK, Defrag, MS-DOS and Windows Scandisk, and DriveSpace) have been revised to work with FAT32. In addition, Microsoft is working with leading device driver and disk utility vendors to support them in revising their products to support FAT32.

PERFORMANCE

For most users, FAT32 will have a negligible performance impact. Some applications may see a slight performance gain from FAT32. In other applications, particularly those heavily dependent on large sequential write operations, FAT32 may result in a modest performance degradation. The overall effect on raw disk performance is less than 5% however, and the overall impact on application performance as measured by Winstone is typically less than 1%.