>
>> FAT32 goes up to 32GB in actual implementations
> i have a 160 gig fat32 hard drive in an external caddy running just fine
> with XP, i just had to format it using a win98 box.
>

Is the "limitation" how many sectors are allowed per cluster? Microsoft's
FAT Overview says BPB_SecPerClus is one byte. Supposedly, for FAT16 (which
is what I'm most familiar with), this could allow 255 sectors per cluster
times 512 bytes per sector times about 65,535 clusters or 8.55e9 bytes per
disk. This would be a cluster size of 262,144 bytes. The Microsoft
document also says the cluster size must be a power of 2, so the maximum
would then be 128, or 65536 bytes per cluster. It ALSO goes on to say you
cannot have a cluster size greater than 32kBytes. So, using a 512 byte
sector, it appears the maximum sectors per cluster would be 64, and the
maximum partition size would be 2G. Again, this is for FAT16.

Is FAT32 similar, but with a larger FAT table, and with 32 bit cluster
identifiers in that table?

Harold

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