After you press Enter, you receive the following prompt:ĭo you wish to use the maximum available size for primary DOS partition?Įnter Y and Fdisk proceeds to allocate the whole disk to the partition.ĭepending on its size, you may choose to divide your hard disk in multiple partitions.Press 1 to select the Create Primary DOS Partition option.Press 1 to select the Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive option: When you’ve deleted all the existing partitions you require, return to the FDISK Options menu.Press Esc to return to the FDISK Options and select option 3 to delete existing partitions.Enter 4 to remind yourself of the current information for the D:drive.Enter 2 and press Esc to return to the FDISK Options.Select option 5 so that you can switch to the newly installed D: drive:.After you press Enter, the Fdisk Options menu is displayed:.If you want to use the FAT16 file system, press N, and then press Enter. If you want to use the FAT32 file system, press Y, and then press Enter.If the hard disk is larger than 512 MB, you receive the following prompt:.At the A:> prompt type fdisk and press Enter.The FAT32 file system does not support drives that are smaller than 512MB.Īfter the system has booted to your startup disk, proceed as follows:
FAT32 is also more robust, being less susceptible to a single point of failure than earlier version of the file system.
This results in more free space on the hard disk. FAT32 supports drives that are up to 2 terabytes (TB) in size and stores files on smaller sections of the hard disk than the FAT16 file system does. This offers the following enhancements over previous implementations of the FAT file system.
Windows 95 OEM Service Release version 2 and later support drives larger than 2GB using the FAT32 file system. Multiplying number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768) equals 2GB.
The size of a cluster must be a power of 2 and less than 65,536 bytes – this results in a maximum cluster size of 32,768 bytes (32K). The FAT file system is limited to 65,525 clusters. The 2GB partition limit is imposed by the maximum number of clusters and the largest cluster size supported by the FAT file system. For example, if you use the FAT16 file system and have a 6GB hard disk, you can have three drive letters (C, D, and E), each with 2GB of allocated space. The FAT16 file system has a maximum of 2 gigabytes (GB) for each allocated space or drive letter. Windows 98 supports both the FAT16 and FAT32 variants, and you need to decide which you are going to use before proceeding any further.
The master boot block then finds out which partition is active, reads the boot code from that partition, and then transfers control to that boot code.įAT – the acronym stands for File Allocation Table – is a file system that was first introduced in 1981. When the machine is turned on, the ROM BIOS will read this master boot block and transfer control to it. This partition table also contains the master boot block. Fdisk writes the partition table into the first sector of track zero of the partitionable disk. It allows you to specify partition sizes and to define which partition will be the active (boot) partition. If you’re installing on a disk you’ve been using previously, you may want to delete it’s existing partitions before creating new ones.Įach allocated space on the hard disk is assigned a drive letter and the Fdisk utility may be used to create, change, delete, or display information about the current partitions on a hard disk. If your second drive is a new, empty hard disk, you’re going to have to first create a primary partition on the disk and then format a file system on that partition.