Expand Floppy Drive FAT

[Richard L Bianchi]

Is there a way to expand the FILE ALLOCATION TABLE on a 3.5
Disk?
Running out of Allocation Table Space, I have a large
number of small files, the Disk is only partically used.

File Compression is my second choice, but I'd just like to know.

-Rick

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[Ian Cairns]

If I remember correctly, the root directory is limited to about 128 entries. however, subdirectories are not limited. So, save the files in a subdirectory. There should be ample room in a single subdirectory for all the small files you have.
Regards,

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[email protected]

[Alan Earnshaw]

The cluster size on a 3.5" HD floppy disk is 512 bytes. Thus, files occupy space in increments of 512 bytes. If you had a 513 byte file, it would occupy two clusters of 512 bytes each, with 511 bytes of the second cluster unused.

To my knowledge, you cannot change the cluster size on a 3.5" disk. Besides, 512 bytes is pretty granular. (Most hard drives have 8192, 16384, or 32768 byte clusters.)

If you really have a lot of slack space, compression is your only choice to recover it.

Alan

P.S. I suspect if you managed to change the cluster size on your floppy disk, it would become unreadable. I think DOS is hard coded for specific sector sizes.

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Alan C. Earnshaw
Information Management Systems, Inc.
http://www.infoms.com

[Robert Green]

Actually, you can set the cluster size and root directory
entries to anything you want. MicroSoft's DMF format, for
example, use a 2K cluster size and a 16 entry root directory.

You do this using special formatting tools like Christoph
Hochstatter's FDFORMAT.

Get it at ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/diskutil/fdform18.lzh.

FDFORMAT will also let you format to a capacity of 1.73K (you
have to use it from pure DOS to get the higher capacities, but
Windows can handle the disks after they are formatted).

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[Richard L Bianchi]

Ian
Thanks.

Alan
Compression Looks Better, Thanks.

Robert
I don't as yet know what to do with a .lzh file, my netscape
opened the file in the Browser, so saving it as SOURCE to my
HD, doesn't make me feel like its a good copy, but last, I
don't have any thing to uncompress it with. If you can help
please email me, [email protected]
Thanks

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[Jerry Fielden]

Richard

Try here for LHA

ftp://ftp.winsite.com/pub/pc/starter/

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