>Just so I understand completely, Alex, you are saying it will allow NT Server to read any FAT 32 drive on a network?

Reading a FAT32 partition across a network is no trick - any network-shared volume can be read, written, altered within the limits of your permissions under MS networking. Start Win95 OSR2 or Win98, make sure that the appropriate File and Print service is installed, create a share. Within the limitations of your access permissions, you can do anything on a remote FAT32 partition that you could do on a remote FAT16 partition - you don't really know anything about the underlying file system anyway.

What NT -can't- do by itself is read and write FAT32 partitions as local devices. NT has native drivers for FAT12, variants of FAT16, including an NT-specific version that allows it to be up to 4GB, and NTFS. Until NT 4.0, NT also supported HPFS volumes in this fashion - NT 4.0 could read but not alter HPFS partitions.

NT's loader required that the files needed to load NT 4.0 reside on a drive partition that used one of the read/write supported partition types.

There are two situations that might exist here. NT's loader could read one of it's supported partition types, load the base NT OS and the drivers from there, and during startup, load drivers to handle the FAT32 file system. That would allow you to access FAT32 partitions local to the system, but not boot from them.

The other, more interesting, possibility is that not only does the driver mentioned above exist, but the NT loader is made 'smarter' to allow it to natively handle the FAT32 partition. This would allow NT to boot from a FAT32 partition.

In the first case, a primary active FAT16 partition or NTFS partition would be needed to host the boot loader, as well as a FAT32 partition accessed once NT starts up. In the second, only a FAT32 partition needs to exist.

The commercial version of FAT32 apparently allows for one or both of these situations.

>
>>Bruce and all,
>>
>>Correction! The uninstall program apparently did not delete the read only version from \winnt\system32. Once that was done and Fat32 reinstalled it worked fine.
>>
>>Mark Russinovich of sysinternals answered my complaint on Sunday. I must commend them as the type of supplier we all need and should support.
>>
>>Alex
>>
>>
>>>Sorry about that Alex. I guess the announcement was a bit misleading but at least they are getting closer. Hopefully NT 5 will be fully compatible. Good luck.
>>>
>>>>Bruce,
>>>>
>>>>Sorry to say, it is not to be. I downloaded the read only version(free), and was able to read fine. Great! Then I paid for the read/write version, and guess what: it only reads. Rereading the "fine print" I saw that it is meant for dual boot environmentes, and I guess not for NT40 only, like mine.
>>>>
>>>>I have asked for a refund since it did not emphasize that it *needs* a dual boot environment and trust they are going to reasonable and give it. However, I am dissapointed because I need that capability badly.
>>>>
>>>>Will keep you abreast of any developments.
>>>>
>>>>Alex