Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/01/29/07:03:42
The reason lies in Dos's 16 bit FAT system. You can have less than 65535
units (called clusters) on the HD. So the bigger a HD gets the bigger
will be the clusters. On the other hand, sector size is 512 bytes in all
these cases. Here is a simple table:
HD Size Minimum required cluster size Space wasted (%),
average
Mbytes (sectors/kbytes)
16-127 Mb 4/2 2
128-255 8/4 4
256-511 16/8 10
512-1023 32/16 25
1024-2048 64/32 40
If you use Norton's FS (file size) command you can find out that those
400 Mbytes are wasted, because every file must occupy at least one
cluster, even when that cluster stores only 1 data byte. Try to
repartition your disk (you can do it without loosing any data with e.g.
PartitionMagic from Powerquest. I bought it and use it succesfully).
Andras
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