Questions and Answers

How do I tell if a drive is a FAT32 drive?
In My Computer, right-click the icon that represents your hard disk, and then click Properties. On the General tab, your type of drive is shown in the upper part of the tab, by the label File system.
If you have a FAT 32 drive, File system: FAT32 is displayed. If you have a FAT 16 drive, File system: FAT is displayed.

How do I enable FAT32?
If you obtained this version of Windows Me with a new computer system, it may already be using the FAT32 disk format. If not, or if you add a new hard disk to your computer and you want to use the FAT32 file system, use the FDISK tool to create the disk partition as FAT32. (Note: Backup any data on the drive before using the FDISK tool to remove an existing partitions as all data currently on the drive will be lost.) To do this, when you are prompted to enable large disk support, choose Yes and any partition created will be marked as FAT32.

Is FAT32 faster than earlier versions of FAT? FAT32, in conjunction with Memory Manager improvements and the application launch time feature of Disk Defragmenter can significantly improve your system performance.

However, FAT32 drives may be significantly slower on disk-intensive operations when your computer is running in MS-DOS mode or when you are running Windows Me in safe mode. If you use MS-DOS mode with FAT32 drives, you may find that performance is improved significantly if you load the Smart Drive disk-caching program.