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Understand the disk partition tool and it use for different file systems.

Do you know how to partition or prepare your hard disk to format it before you will install an operating system like Windows XP by using the Windows XP Setup program? If your answer is NO, then this article below will help you but this is quite more useful to advance computer users or those tech savvy people. It will teach some points to consider before you format you hard drive and will feature a disk partition tool that will help you all throughout. 

It is believed that there are many ways or methods to partition or format the hard disk before Windows XP software will be installed in it like the Fdisk and Format tools. If you are using only Windows XP as your operating system and you want to create partitions besides the system or startup partitions, you may try the Windows XP Disk Management tools to format or partition your hard disk. Discussed below are the two types of options and it is up to you on what disk partition tool you are going to use.

How to Use Format and Fdisk Tools

Before installing your desired operating system like Windows XP, it is best if you create a primary partition on your hard disk and then try to format a file system on that partition. The first tool to be featured is the Fdisk tool. It is an MS-DOS-based tool in partitioning your hard disk. When you create partitions of the hard disk (primary, extended and logical drive), each of the partitions will be assigned with a drive letter. An extended partition may have disk 1 and the second hard disk might contain the extended or primary partition. One or more logical MS-DOS drives may be part of an extended partition.

Definitely, the first tool you will be using is the Fdisk partition tool to your hard disk and after that, you can use the Format tool to format the partitions made with a file system. The File Allocation Table (FAT) which is a kind of file system will allow the hard drive to accept, retrieve, and store data. The operating systems that support the FAT16 and FAT32 file systems would include Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2), Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition (Me), and lastly, Windows 2000. If you have a hard disk that contains space of more than 512 MB, the Fdisk tool, if you are using it will prompt you to choose one of the following file systems below:

FAT16

The maximum allocated space for each drive on this file system has a maximum of 2 GB. In simple terms, if you are going to choose the FAT 16 file system and you have a 6-GB hard drive, then you can therefore have three drive letters (C, D, and E) in which each will have 2 GB of allocated space.  So that is how you make the partitions for your hard disk.

FAT 32

This supports hard disks with more than 2 terabytes of storage capacity or space. It can as well store files or data on smaller sections of the hard disk compared to a FAT16 file system.  This means that you have more FREE space in your disk. If the partitioned space or drive is less than 512 MB, then FAT32 file system does not support it.

One thing that you should know when running the fdisk and format commands in your computer is that the Master Boot Record or MBR and file allocation tables will be then created. The two that are created serve an important function for the hard disk. This will help the hard disk to accept, store and retrieve data. This is will be discussed further on topics about MS-DOS partitioning and hard disk geometry which is a detailed and complicate subjects to talk to.

FAT file system

How many clusters that the FAT file system has? You have to note that the 2-GB partition limit is determined by the number of clusters and is also the largest cluster size that a FAT file system could support. There is a limit to 65,525 clusters in a FAT file system. When you speak of the size of a cluster, it should be power of 2 and should be less than 65,536 bytes. The resulting cluster will then be a size of 32,768 bytes. So in doing the numbers, you will get 2 GB when you multiply the maximum number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768). One important thing to remember is that the hard disk must be compatible with the computer’s ROM BIOS APIs which have a 1024-cylinder limitation so that Fdisk can do the partition in it. Else, you will fail on that note.

If you will really think much of the 32K per cluster, it is a waste in the hard disk space. Many claimed that the FAT file system is not the best management scheme for your hard disk. If you are going to speak about Microsoft Windows NT, it uses an NT File System (NTFS) which uses a different size or cluster scheme. However, Microsoft OS/2 version uses a more conservative scheme in partitioning the disk allocation.


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