PC File Systems

Posted May 17th, 2007 by eugene

Reprinted, with permission, from The PC Guide

PC File Systems

A Brief History of the Hard Disk Drive
Construction and Operation of the Hard Disk Drive
Hard Disk Geometry and Low-Level Data Structures
Hard Disk Performance, Quality and Reliability
Hard Disk BIOS and Capacity Factors
Hard Disk Interfaces and Configuration
Hard Disk Logical Structures and File Systems

Operating Systems and File Systems
PC File Systems

FAT
FAT32
Virtual FAT (VFAT)
NT File System (NTFS)

Major Disk Structures and the Boot Process
FAT File System Disk Volume Structures
Clusters and File Allocation
Partitioning, Partition Sizes and Drive Lettering
Disk Partitioning and Formatting Programs
Disk Compression

There are several different file systems that are commonly used in PCs. This section briefly lists them and discusses how they differ. Note that the rest of the discussion on file systems elaborates significantly on most of the file systems listed here.

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PC File Systems

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