From: Jon Barrett
To: Dan Seto
Subject: Installing into Root
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:45:43 -0500That changed, actually, with FAT32, when they allowed even the Root directory to be extensible. It's also not an issue with NTFS. It's not a terribly good idea from the standpoint of disk clutter, and an even worse one to not allow you the choice of installation points, but any system that's in danger of running out of root directory entries is probably going to run out of storage space first.
Jon
Jon Barrett
Kensington, MD
In addition to the information from Jon above, Microsoft FAT16 has a maximum of 512 root entries. For FAT32, entries are apparently limited only by the size of the drive/partition (or 32GB under FAT32 in Windows 2000 and 32 terabytes under NTFS).
So the moral of the story is if you are using FAT 16 under Windows 95 or Windows 98 you are limited to 512 entries in the root directory. Hence, it makes sense to keep the root directory below that number at all times or, if otherwise possible, switch to FAT32 or upgrade to NTFS.
By the way, for those of you out there who think no one would have that many files/directories in root it is obvious you have never been involved in PC support because I've seen it several times. I've seen users install programs directly into root and I've seen users saving their data files in root. And then, to top that off, when they needed more space, they simply deleted all of the files in root. The consequences of which are for another post.
Needless to say, there are probably millions of people out there still using Windows95 so this information is still relevant to a lot of people.
Thanks to Jon for reminding me of something I knew at the time but have since long forgotten.
Aloha!
