Special Edition Using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 4.0

The FAT32 File System

The FAT file system is the system used by DOS to keep track of the storage of files on disks. Files are stored in units called clusters, which in turn are made up of sectors. Each sector is 512 bytes, but the size of a cluster varies, depending on the size of the hard disk. The FAT or File Allocation Table is used to keep track of which clusters belong to which files. Thus, although a file may be made up of many clusters scattered across your hard disk, the FAT table keeps track of the clusters so your applications will "see" the clusters as one file.

The original version of Windows 95, as well as DOS, uses a file system called FAT16, a 16-bit file system. There are two major drawbacks to the FAT16 file system in this age ...