High-level formatting .........................................................................
The third step is high-level formatting,which is the application of file structure
and an indexing system to the hard drive. Think of this as a table of contents
for your operating system, applications, and data.The original organizational scheme for PCs used the FATsystem, which was
not a weight-loss program but rather an acronym for File Attribute Table.As
systems became more sophisticated and capable of dealing with larger com-
puter words and larger drives, Microsoft advanced through FAT12 (used on
floppy disks), FAT16, and FAT32 versions. FAT16 can deal with partitions of
just over 2 GB; FAT32 breaks through the barrier all the way through to 2 TB.
(A terabyte is 2^40 , or 1,024 gigabytes, or if you insist, 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
When you reach that point, you can bet that the marketing department will
round up disk capacities to the next highest trillion bytes.)The most current organizational scheme is NTFS (New Technology File
System),which offers a number of efficiencies and essentially removes all
limits on file size; files can be as large as the size of the entire drive or parti-
tion (As this book goes to press the current limit is 16 TB minus 1 KB, which
is very, very, very large and bigger than any hard disk drive you’re likely to
see in a laptop for a long, long time.)Nearly all current laptops use Windows 98 or a later version of that operating
system in order to take advantage of features including USB (more on USB in
Chapter 16). All can work with the old and relatively inefficient FAT system,
but only Windows NT and Windows XP can work with NTFS. Here’s a break-
out of what works with which:FAT16 can be used on all versions of Windows including 95, 98, NT, 2000,
and XP.FAT32 works with Windows 95 OSR2, 98, ME, 2000, and XP. Based on a
32-bit file allocation table, FAT32 made its way into a revised version of
Windows 95 called 95B, or OEM Service Release 2. Subsequent releases
of Windows also support it.
NTFS disks are accessible to Windows XP and Windows 2000. Computers
running Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 4 or later may be able to
access some files, but this combination is not recommended.What does this mean to you? If you buy a new laptop, it will probably come
formatted as an NTFS disk, and that is just fine. The only reason to use FAT32
is if you are running an older machine or are mixing and matching older hard-
ware and a current operating system, or the other way around.126 Part III: Laying Hands on the Major Parts