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What are the difference between MS-dos FAT32 format and windows FAT32 format?

Rahbee Alvee
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    What exactly is "MS-DOS FAT32"? According to Wikipedia, "FAT32 was introduced with Windows 95 OSR2". – bzlm Aug 05 '10 at 08:30
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    FAT32 is a file system. MS-DOS and Windows are operating systems. You can run Linux on FAT32 too, and it'll still be the same FAT32. – Cylindric Nov 24 '11 at 17:06
  • MS-DOS support FAT32 by formating harddisk using 'fdisk' and then 'format'. – dns Jun 11 '14 at 00:08

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Hum... Fyi, on a mac (running macos), in the Terminal application, you can scan a USB key using the "diskutil" command line utility. When the key is brand new, you get this result:

$ diskutil list disk2 /dev/disk2 (internal, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *16.1 GB disk2 1: Windows_FAT_32 EVERIO_SD 16.1 GB disk2s1

If you format the USB key with the "Disk Utility.app", using the "MS-DOS (FAT32)" parameter, then you will get:

$ diskutil list disk2 /dev/disk2 (internal, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *16.1 GB disk2 1: DOS_FAT_32 EVERIO_SD 16.1 GB disk2s1

So, at least from the point of view of macos, there seems to be a potential difference between "Windows_FAT_32" and "DOS_FAT_32"...

duthen
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    DOS_FAT_32 is type 0x0B in an MBR partition map. Windows_FAT_32 is type 0x0C in an MBR partition map. 0x0C is FAT32 with logical block addressing. – zevlag May 03 '19 at 17:59
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FAT32 is a filesystem and has nothing much to do with the operating system. So whatever OS it is, FAT32 is FAT32, and they're the same.

Afaik, MS-DOS used FAT16 as its default filesystem, while FAT32 was first introduced by Win95 OSR2, or Win97 as known by others. I'm FAT32 is not supported by MS-DOS versions before v7.x, which was shipped with Win95 OSR2.

So if your question was "What's the difference between MS-DOS FAT and Windows FAT", the answer would be MS-DOS uses FAT16 while Windows uses FAT32.

S. Liu
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There is none.. There's only FAT32, no Windows or MS-DOS flavors of it.

Mchl
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  • Have you count the LFN extension? – J-16 SDiZ Dec 23 '11 at 05:36
  • No, since it's OS' responsibility not FS' – Mchl Dec 27 '11 at 22:19
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    Technically, VFAT is a trick/abuse of FAT that allows DOS to simply ignore the LFNs; it is not actually a different file-system. Also, while it originally devised in Windows 95, it is certainly available for DOS via a TSR. So it is indeed dependent on how the OS handles the regular FAT32 file-system as opposed to being a variant. – Synetech Mar 01 '12 at 03:55