1. INTRODUCTION
Files in Windows XP can be organized on the hard disk in two different ways.
  a. The old FAT (File Allocation Table) file system was developed originally (when the original IBM PCs came out) for MS-DOS on small machines and floppy disks. There are variants -- FAT12 is used on all floppy disks, for example -- but hard disk partitions in Windows XP can be assumed to use the FAT32 version, or 32-bit File Allocation Table.
  b. Later, a more advanced file system was developed for hard disks in Windows NT, called NTFS (the "NT File System"). This has matured, through several versions, into the latest one that exists alongside FAT in Windows XP.

The file system used goes with an individual partition of the disk. You can mix the two types on the same physical drive. The Windows XP operating system is the same, whichever file system is used for its partition, so it is a mistake (and source of confusion) to speak of "a FAT disk reading an NTFS partition." It is the operating system, not the disk, which does the reading.

Actual files are unaffected by which file system they are on; that is merely a matter of a method of storage. An analogy would be letters stored in an office. They might be in box-files on shelves (FAT) or in suspended folders in file cabinets (NTFS); but the letters themselves would be unaffected by the choice of which way to store them, and could be moved from one storage place to the other. Similarly, files can be moved between folders on an NTFS partition and folders on a FAT partition or across a network to another machine that might not even be running Windows.

EXAMPLE: Consider the downloading to your computer of a file through a link on a web page. You click on the link, and the file is copied across the Internet and stored on your hard drive. If you download the file from this present site, the file is stored on a computer running UNIX, which uses neither FAT nor NTFS. The file itself is not affected when it is copied from a Windows computer to the Unix-based server, or copied from that server to your Windows-based computer.

However, if a machine has two different operating systems on it, dual booted, they may not both be able to read both types of partition. DOS (including an Emergency Startup boot floppy), Windows 95/98, and Windows ME cannot handle NTFS (without third party assistance). Early versions of Windows NT cannot handle FAT32, only FAT16. So, if you have such a mixed environment, any communal files must be held on a partition of a type that both operating systems can understand -- meaning, usually, a FAT32 partition.

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Tags: windows,NTFS,file system,fat,ntfs