NTFS

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 03:50:59PM -0600, Garth Meisel wrote:
> Roughly Sun January 25 2004 2:14 pm, David Tilbrook said:
> <snip>
> < Warning: SFU needs to be on an NTFS file system.
> 
> That's probably true but very unfair to those loyal 98SE users because isn't 
> FAT32 and NTFS the same thing with a different name?  NTFS allows for greater 
> than 8 character naming but the context of file is on disk and DOS is 
> responsible.  

No.  FAT32 is a 32bit version of fat16 to allow more than 2GB
partitions.

FAT16 uses a 16bit table of clusters where each cluster can be up to 32k
(64k on NT).  This gives 2^31 bytes per partition (2GB) or 2^32 bytes on
NT (4GB).

FAT32 just extends this to using a 32bit cluster table, to allow much
larger filesystems using much more reasonable 4K or so clusters.

NTFS on the other hand is a totally different filesystem with
compression, security, file ownerships, groups, etc.

Nothing alike at all.

VFAT is an extension to FAT16 and FAT32 to allow long file names to be
stored using otherwise invalid attribute combinations stored in the
directory structure allowing some 14 or 15 characters per entry to be
stored (using many entries for a longer name) and of course allows
special characters (including upper AND lower case).  Since the
attribute combinations are invalid under normal use, other systems that
don't know about them just ignore them as junk that has nothing to do
with the files.

FAT12 is a the earlier version that allows up to 32MB partitions.  It is
mostly used on floppies.

Lennart Sorensen
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