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FAT stands for File Allocation System. FAT, or FAT16 are the same and only recognize a maximum of 2047MB (2GB) of hard-disk partition. FAT32 (Supported by some late releases of win95 and win98) can accomodate much larger partition size. To convert them, you must first have the drivers for FAT32 on your system. Win98 have a standard conversion tools in the System Tools menu.

Will is right, but he omits to say that it is a means of more efficiently storing information on your hard drive, by resizing cluster allocation, therefore freeing up what sometimes can be a significant amount of room on the said drive. Also any hdd can be converted with the right software, with a Win95/98 bootdisk it can be done via Fdisk.

caution !!!!::: do not do it with fdisk if you dont know what you are doing you can easily wipe your hard drive that way.. do it via control panel in win 98

Hi, Windows-based PCs use FAT16, FAT32 and the NT File System (NTFS). FAT16 works with DOS 4.0 and later, as well as all versions of Windows. FAT32 was introduced with Windows 95 Service Release 2, and it's the default file system for Win98. FAT32 does not work with NT, but it will be available with Windows 2000 (formerly NT 5.0). NTFS works only with NT and Windows 2000 (which will include a new version, NTFS 5). A file allocation table (FAT) is a table that an operating system maintains on a hard disk that provides a map of the clusters (the basic unit of logical storage on a hard disk) that a file has been stored in. When you write a new file to a hard disk, the file is stored in one or more clusters that are not necessarily next to each other; they may be rather widely scattered over the disk. A typical cluster size is 2,048 bytes, 4,096 bytes, or 8,192 bytes The File Allocation Table, or FAT, keeps track of where files and pieces of files are stored. FAT16 uses 16-bit cluster addresses to locate files. The operating system stores a new file by looking for the first free cluster on the disk, then takes as many clusters as are required to hold it. The OS logs a file's clusters in the FAT. Ideally, the OS will find enough adjacent empty clusters to place an entire file in one contiguous area of the disk. That's how it works on a new or a freshly defragmented drive. But a drive isn't so well organized after it has been used for a while. The OS starts with the first free cluster; if there is not enough room for the entire file, it skips to the next free cluster until it finishes writing the file. A file broken up among nonadjacent sectors is called a fragmented file. Because the disk heads must jump around to read a fragmented file, system performance slows. A defragmentation utility such as Win9x's Defrag rearranges all the files on a disk into contiguous clusters to speed up disk reads. FAT32 uses a cluster size of 4KB for partitions up to 8GB, 8KB cluster sizes for partitions up to 16GB, 16KB up to 32GB and 32KB beyond that. The theoretical maximum partition for FAT32 is 2 terabytes (TB) or 2,048GB. (The maximum size of an EIDE hard disk is 127GB, so we're not likely to see very large partitions any time soon.) Thanks to its smaller clusters, FAT32 uses disk space much more efficiently than FAT16. That 1KB file mentioned above wastes just 3KB of space on an 8GB FAT32 partition. FAT32's main drawback is that Win3.x, early versions of Win95 and any version of NT cannot see FAT32 partitions without the use of special drivers. You can't use disk compression software with FAT32, either. How can I convert from FAT16 to FAT32 or back again? A: Win98 comes with a utility (Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Drive Converter) to allow you to convert a FAT16 partition to FAT32. It's a one-way process, though. If you switch to FAT32, you can only revert to FAT16 by using either a boot disk to repartition and reformat the hard disk, or a third-party program such as PowerQuest's PartitionMagic. After repartitioning and reformatting the disk, however, you must reinstall all your software-including the operating system You can visit the following links for information on FAT converters: http://www.paragon-gmbh.com/n_pm.htm http://support.microsoft.com/support/windows/inproducthelp98/fat32_bullets.asp http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/win98_fat32_faq.html http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000142.htm Regards Sherlock

please explain to me in english..lol what a contiguous file is. when i go to defrag it tells me that most of my computer is these files and i dont know how to get the removed or etc. i have windows 2000 professional