Simplest (practical) file system?

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Mon Jul 28 12:52:01 2003

On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
> If you absolutely must start with a FAT system I think that
> you should use a DOS like FAT. This makes things easy to
> move from machine to machine. The 12 bit FAT is a little clumsy
> so I'd suggest the 16 bit as the easier to deal with.

FAT16 is limited to 4G

But DOS and Win9x limits it to 2147483647 (NTx permits 4G).
The 2G limitation is due to the use of signed long ints in places that
should have an UNSIGNED long int. Because of that, it can have files with
a NEGATIVE size!


One of my hard drives was getting crowded; I was down to less than a meg
of free space. So, I stepped on the directory of a floppy, and created
a file that reported a size of -2147483648. Surely, if I copied a file
with that much negative size to the drive, it would give me more free
space! But it was unable to do the COPY.
Received on Mon Jul 28 2003 - 12:52:01 BST