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The FAT file system is a file system used on MS-DOS and Windows 9x family of operating systems. [3] It continues to be used on mobile devices and embedded systems, and thus is a well-suited file system for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from 1981 through to the present.
The file system uses an index table stored on the device to identify chains of data storage areas associated with a file, the File Allocation Table (FAT). The FAT is statically allocated at the time of formatting. The table is a linked list of entries for each cluster, a contiguous area of disk storage. Each entry contains either the number of ...
A bad sector in computing is a disk sector on a disk storage unit that is unreadable. Upon taking damage, all information stored on that sector is lost. When a bad sector is found and marked, the operating system like Windows or Linux will skip it in the future. Bad sectors are a threat to information security in the sense of data remanence.
A rising number of bad sectors can be a sign of a failing hard drive, but because the hard drive automatically adds them to its own growth defect table, [4] they may not become evident to utilities such as ScanDisk unless the utility can catch them before the hard drive's defect management system does, or the backup sectors held in reserve by ...
This should not be confused with fragmentation, as the sectors are still logically contiguous. A "lost cluster" occurs when a file is deleted from the directory listing, but the File Allocation Table (FAT) still shows the clusters allocated to the file. [15] The term cluster was changed to allocation unit in DOS 4.0. However the term cluster is ...
When using sector slipping for bad sectors, disk access time is not largely affected. The drive will skip over a bad sector using the time it would have used to read it. Spare sectors are located on the disk to aid in having sectors to “slip” other sectors down to, allowing for the preservation of sequential ordering of the data.
Due to different types of fields and the amount of data they contain, the length of the BPB is different for FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS boot sectors. [1] A detailed discussion of the various FAT BPB versions and their entries can be found in the FAT article.)
badblocks is a Linux utility to check for bad sectors on a disk drive. It can create a text file with list of these sectors that can be used with other programs, like mkfs, so that they are not used in the future and thus do not cause corruption of data. It is part of the e2fsprogs project, [1] and a port is available for BSD operating systems. [2]