Member Avatar for hermann87

Hi, I've been studying Operating Systems the past few days and have a question regarding File Allocation Table.

From my understanding, each cluster in a HDD has its own entry in File Allocation Table.
Here's an exercise from my book :

Suppose that a computer with an HDD formatted in FAT16, 8KB clusters are used and that one bit of each entry in FAT is occupied by irrelevant information. What is the maximum file size that can be stored in the HDD?

Here's my answer :

FAT16 uses 2^16 = 65,536 clusters, hence 65,536 irrelevant information bits. 65,536/8/1024 = 8KB irrelevant information.

The total size of the HDD is 8KB (cluster size) * 65,536 = 524,288KB = 512MB.

So the maximum file size is 524,288 - 8 = 524,280KB.

Is that correct? If not, what am I doing wrong?
Thank you.

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Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

That sounds about right from what I recall of the 16-bit MS-DOS operating system.

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