On Nov 24, 5:54*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:
On Nov 23, 7:57*pm, who where wrote:

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:39:04 +0000 (UTC), "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"

wrote:
Drive letters BTW, are not C and D on the same drive if there is more than one
drive, it's C is the boot drive, D is the first partition on the second drive,
E is the second partition on the second drive and so on........

Not quite the case. *After C: and D: as above, E: (F:, G: etc) will be
the partitions on the first HD and THEN follow the partitions on the
second HD.

So at the risk of sounding like a dummy, is the FAT a function of the
particular hard drive or is it a function of the operating system? And
in my previous question, would a much smaller drive have a FAT 16
system that would be happy in the same bed as DOS 6.2? I need to run
6.2 as my programs run under that. I don't absolutely need to run
Windows on that computer. I have others, however it is handy at times
as some of my DOS documents occasionally are copied, pasted, and then
go out as emails.

If someone could please explain the FAT system with respect to Windows
and DOS I would be very grateful. Lenny

As Michael Terrell said the FAT is how the OS finds files. The OS
defines which version of FAT it uses. FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS can all be
on the same physical drive in separate partitions. I used to run
multiple OSs and had similar problems and got around them by using
Partitionmagic and Bootmagic to set up 3 partitions on the hard disc.
The first 2 were both 2 GB FAT16 and the 3rd was the remainder of he
disc as FAT32. At boot time Bootmagic gave a choice of DOS 6.22 or
Win98SE. The 3nd FAT 16 partition was visible to both OSs and used as
a 'transfer' block where you could place files for exchange between
the OSs. For example a file in DOS to be emailed using Win98 was first
placed in the transfer zone and reboot into Win98 and do the email
operation. I still have an Athlon 3200 machine dual boot DOS6.22 or
Win XP Pro, also with the transfer partition. I had an Athlon XP
machine at my last job that had DOS 6.22 in a FAT16 partition, Win98SE
in a FAT32 partition and Win XP pro in an NTFS partition with a 4th
FAT16 transfer partition visible to all OSs. It used Bootmagic to
select OSs and defaulted to XP if you didn't make a selection

The newer machines with the Phenom II chips will 'sort of' run DOS.
The boards no longer support DOS upper memory blocks (DOS high UMB) so
it's limited to 640K - that's it.

Don't know if this helps but it may give some ideas.

Happy Thanksgiving

G²