FAT32 is an abbreviation of File allocation table. This file system was originated in 1980’s supporting operating systems are windows MS-Dos. Later on Windows 95 and windows 98 were based on this FAT32 file system. FAT32 was the default file system of windows 98 and windows Me. This file system can also be installed on the windows2000-server and professional version, windows XP and windows 2003, even if they support NTFS file system.

FAT32 has some advantages as well as some disadvantages and most common of them are given below.

Useful Features:

1. FAT32 can provide support 2 terabytes of partition.
2. It is very useful in a sense that it uses almost all the space of hard disk. Cluster size used by FAT32 is very small as for 4GB disk, cluster size is almost 4kb.

Drawbacks of FAT32:

1. It is slightly slower than FAT16 depending upon the size of disk.
2. It does not provide support to older management tools, mother board and BIOS’s.
3. It is not very much secure, recoverable and tolerant incase of any mishap like system crash and power failure.
4. It does not allow compression to files.

Structure of FAT32

MBR (Master Boot Record) is considered to be same for all kinds of operating systems. The information of MBR is present at first sector of hard disk; it is accessible at cylinder number 0, head number 0 and sector number1. When operating system boots these are the lines which execute just after the checking of all the hardware. Main and important part of system information is placed in the partition table and this partition table is placed in this section. If any thing goes wrong with this table, it affects the working of hard drive.

First sector of partition contains information about FAT32 boot record. Second sector of the partition contains all the information of file system used by the operating system.

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