What (who) is file allocation table - definition
FAMILY OF FILE SYSTEMS ORIGINALLY DEVELOPED BY MICROSOFT
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File Allocation Table
<file system> (FAT) The component of an MS-DOS or {Windows
95} file system which describes the files, directories,
and free space on a hard disk or floppy disk.
A disk is divided into partitions. Under the FAT {file
system} each partition is divided into clusters, each of
which can be one or more sectors, depending on the size of
the partition. Each cluster is either allocated to a file or
directory or it is free (unused). A directory lists the name,
size, modification time and starting cluster of each file or
subdirectory it contains.
At the start of the partition is a table (the FAT) with one
entry for each cluster. Each entry gives the number of the
next cluster in the same file or a special value for "not
allocated" or a special value for "this is the last cluster in
the chain". The first few clusters after the FAT contain the
root directory.
The FAT file system was originally created for the CP/M[? ]
operating system where files were catalogued using 8-bit
addressing. MS DOS's FAT allows only 8.3 filenames.
With the introduction of MS-DOS 4 an incompatible 16-bit FAT
(FAT16) with 32-kilobyte clusters was introduced that
allowed partitions of up to 2 gigabytes.
Microsoft later created FAT32 to support partitions larger
than two gigabytes and pathnames greater that 256
characters. It also allows more efficient use of disk space
since clusters are four kilobytes rather than 32 kilobytes.
FAT32 was first available in OEM Service Release 2 of
Windows 95 in 1996. It is not fully backward compatible
with the 16-bit and 8-bit FATs.
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http://home.c2i.net/tkjoerne/os/fat.htm.
File Allocation Tablebrainy/">http://teleport.com/File Allocation Tablebrainy/.
http://209.67.75.168/hardware/fatgen.htm.
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q154/9/97.asp.
Compare: NTFS.
[How big is a FAT? Is the term used outside MS DOS? How long
is a FAT16 filename? ]
(2000-02-05)
FAT32
VFAT
<operating system> A standard developed by Microsoft to
enable long file names on standard FAT partitions. VFAT
suffers from all the drawbacks of FAT and adds more problems
but moving to it is very easy.
(1996-12-23)
Wikipedia
File Allocation Table
File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers and was the default filesystem for MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. The increase in disk drives capacity required three major variants: FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32. FAT was replaced with NTFS as the default file system on Microsoft operating systems starting with Windows XP. Nevertheless, FAT continues to be used on flash and other solid-state memory cards and modules (including USB flash drives), many portable and embedded devices because of its compatibility and ease of implementation.
