Re: [Freedos-devel] FORMAT 0.91m released

[Patrick J. L. <pa...@us...>]

Eric Auer <eric@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE> writes:

> This version should now be foolproof enough to run even under Win9x,
> and it sports yet another NEW command line switch /A. If you activate
> that switch, the data clusters will start at a sector number which will
> be a multiple of 8. This is useful for optimizing filesystems IF your
> filesystem uses 4k or bigger cluster size. The /A switch will work for
> smaller clusters, too, but ONLY if you have at least 4k cluster size you
> will be able to use an optimized FAT32->NTFS conversion in WinXP or newer.

(It might be nice to take a numeric argument like oformat does, in
case the user wants a larger alignment.  But 4K clusters are what MS
recommends for NTFS, so I'm not complaining.)

I can confirm that using "format /a" on a 4000M FAT32 partition and
then converting it to NTFS on Windows XP yields a 4K cluster size on
the NTFS volume.  Excellent.

Very nice work!

 - Pat