- #WINDOWS 95 OSR2 AND BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES HOW TO#
- #WINDOWS 95 OSR2 AND BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES DRIVERS#
- #WINDOWS 95 OSR2 AND BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES DRIVER#
- #WINDOWS 95 OSR2 AND BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES WINDOWS#
Protect-mode only support for NTFS would not have allowed Windows to boot from an NTFS volume. Adding NTFS support to the MS-DOS kernel would have required a significant amount of MS-DOS memory, and that would have precluded the use of many MS-DOS mode games and applications. Windows 95 still supports real mode MS-DOS for booting and running some MS-DOS-based games. It is not feasible to implement NTFS in the memory and compatibility constraints of the Windows 95 platform. NTFS is an advanced file system, with support for many features not present in FAT32, including per-file compression, security, and transitioning. If you answer yes, any partition you create that's greater than 512 MB is marked as a FAT32 partition. In OEM Service Release 2, if you run the fdisk utility on a large system with a drive over 512 MB, it asks whether to enable large disk support. 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%. In other applications, particularly those heavily dependent on large sequential write operations, FAT32 may result in a modest performance degradation. Some applications may see a slight performance gain from FAT32. Performanceįor most users, FAT32 has a negligible performance impact.
#WINDOWS 95 OSR2 AND BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES DRIVER#
Microsoft has worked with the leading device driver and disk utility vendors to support FAT32. Microsoft's bundled disk utilities ( format, fdisk, Defrag, MS-DOS ScanDisk, Windows ScanDisk, and DriveSpace) were revised to work with FAT32.
#WINDOWS 95 OSR2 AND BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES DRIVERS#
However, MS-DOS block device drivers (e.g., ASPIDISK.SYS) and disk utilities for these need to be revised to support FAT32 drives. Existing utilities and drivers should continue to work on FAT32 drives. Most applications are unaffected by these changes. However, because 4 bytes are now required to store cluster values, many internal add-on disk data structures and published APIs fail on FAT32 drives.
Compatibilityįor compatibility with existing applications, networks, and drivers, FAT32 was implemented with as little change as possible to Windows 95's existing architecture, internal data structures, APIs, and on-disk format. Note, however, that while the FAT32 design allows for this compatibility, it cannot be implemented by Microsoft in the initial release. These features allow for dynamic re-sizing of FAT32 partitions. FAT mirroring can be disabled, allowing a copy of the FAT other than the first to be active. The root directory of a FAT32 drive is now an ordinary cluster chain, so it can be arbitrarily larger and located anywhere on the drive. The boot record on FAT32 drives was expanded to include a backup of critical data structures, so they are less susceptible to a single point of failure. FAT32 can relocate the root directory and use the backup copy of the FAT instead of the default copy. As you can see, a 32 GB drive or larger supports the same cluster size as FAT16. The below table demonstrates the cluster size for various sizes of hard drives.
#WINDOWS 95 OSR2 AND BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES HOW TO#
How to determine the version of Windows on a computer.įAT32 provides the below enhancements over previous implementations of the FAT tile system:įAT32 uses space more efficiently with smaller clusters (e.g., 4 kb clusters for drives up to 8 GB in size), resulting in up to 5% more efficient use of disk space relative to large FAT drives.System Requirements: FAT32 cannot be downloaded and is only available with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98. FAT32 is an enhancement of the FAT file system that supports larger hard drives with improved disk space efficiency. FAT currently can support a single disk volume up to 2 Gigabytes in size. With new generations of very large hard drives, the existing FAT data structures has reached the limit of their ability to support ever-larger media. In 1996, Windows 95 OSR2 came out with FAT32, a new and improved FAT. Although originally intended for floppy disks, FAT was modified to be a fast and flexible system for managing data on both removable and fixed media. The existing FAT (file allocation table) file system was invented in 1977 as a way to store data on floppy disks for Microsoft stand-alone Disk Basic.