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File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers and was the default file system for the MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. [citation needed] Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices.
Microsoft and IBM operating systems determine the type of FAT file system used on a volume solely by the number of clusters, not by the used BPB format or the indicated file system type, that is, it is technically possible to use a "FAT32 EBPB" also for FAT12 and FAT16 volumes as well as a DOS 4.0 EBPB for small FAT32 volumes.
According to Microsoft, the basic data partition is the equivalent to master boot record (MBR) partition types 0x06 , 0x07 (NTFS or exFAT), and 0x0B . [2] In practice, it is equivalent to 0x01 ( FAT12 ), 0x04 ( FAT16 ), 0x0C (FAT32 with logical block addressing ), and 0x0E (FAT16 with logical block addressing) types as well.
The exFAT format allows individual files larger than 4 GB, facilitating long continuous recording of HD video, which can exceed the 4 GB limit in less than an hour. Current digital cameras using FAT32 will break the video files into multiple segments of approximately 2 or 4 GB.
For example, the FAT32 file system does not support files larger than 4 GiB−1 (with older applications even only 2 GiB−1); the variant FAT32+ does support larger files (up to 256 GiB−1), but (so far) is only supported in some versions of DR-DOS, [2] [3] so users of Microsoft Windows have to use NTFS or exFAT instead.
VFAT, a variant of FAT with an extended directory format, was introduced in Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5. It allowed mixed-case Unicode long filenames (LFNs) in addition to classic 8.3 names by using multiple 32-byte directory entry records for long filenames (in such a way that old 8.3 system software will only recognize one as the valid directory entry).
FAT12, but logically format incompatible with MS-DOS/PC DOS. 1981: PC DOS 1.0: FAT12: 1982: MS-DOS 1.25: FAT12: 1982: Commodore 64 / 1541: Commodore DOS (CBM DOS) 1984: PC DOS 3.0 / MS-DOS 3.0: FAT16: 1984: Classic Mac OS: Macintosh File System (MFS) 1985: Atari TOS: Modified FAT12: 1985: Classic Mac OS: Hierarchical File System (HFS) 1987 ...
In computing, format is a command-line utility that carries out disk formatting. It is a component of various operating systems , including 86-DOS , MS-DOS , IBM PC DOS and OS/2 , Microsoft Windows and ReactOS .