NTFS Theory Guide Article

[clutch 1]

From what I remember, Win2K/XP can format an NTFS partition natively at boot time, and doesn't need to be formatted in FAT first, and then converted (as was the case with NT4). If this were true, the boot-time partition setup would have a much smaller cap on it. Doesn't Win2K/XP have a 40GB cap or some such with FAT32? I have formatted 120GB partitions using NTFS, and this wouldn't fly following this person's statement.

[Toby 0]

From page:

 

A FAT32 volume must have a minimum of 65,527 clusters. Windows XP Professional can format FAT32 volumes up to 32 GB, but it can mount larger FAT32 volumes created by other operating systems.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treevie...kc_fil_tdrn.asp

 

It don't say anything special about the system-partition but I remember some kind of limitation, I'll search a little more..

/Toby

[clutch 1]

Actually, I dug this up and emailed the author:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treevie...vgs/sgsch03.asp

 

He's up[censored] his article now.

[FrankE 0]

The "missing" HDD space is a result from the non-standardized size annotations of memory sizes.

 

When talking of RAM : 1KB is 2^10 or 1,024 Bytes, 1MB is 1,024KB or 2^20 or 1,024*1,024 = 1,048,576 Bytes, 1GB is 1,024MB or 1,024*1,024KB or 2^30 or 1,024*1,024*1,024 = 1,073,741,814 Bytes.

 

With HDDs the case is slightly different: HDD manufacturers usually claim 1KB as 10^3 or 1,000 Bytes, 1MB as 1,000KB or 10^6 or 1,000,000 Bytes, 1GB as 1,000MB or 10^9 or 1,000,000,000 Bytes.

 

So 120*1,000,000,000 Bytes (as quoted by HDD standards) = equals 111.75871GB unformatted space in memory standards quotations. Please cut a little bit space due to formatting reasons (management overhead)

 

This is one thing most people misunderstand. The memory size calculation is based on doubling of bus widths in history (8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit to 128 bit to 256 bit), while the harddisk space calculation method uses "normal peoples" counting based on 10.

As a side effect the figures presented by this method are "higher".

[clutch 1]

Well, the original article was just someone stating that the harddrive had to be formatted as FAT first, and then converted to NTFS during installation in Win2K and XP. While this happened in NT 4, it isn't the case with 2K and XP.