Questions tagged [file-system]
For questions regarding file systems and software interfaces to them.
65 questions
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Was VM/FSF the ancestor of VM SFS, or something unrelated?
In 1983, IBM released VM/FSF (Virtual Machine/File Storage Facility) V1R1M0, product number 5798-DMY. See e.g. SC24-5237-1 VM/SP Installation Guide Release 3.1, February 1984 PDF page 307.
A January ...
11
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2
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Where could I find information on the NEC PC-88/PC-98 file systems?
As part of the library I am writing, I would like to give support to NEC PC-88 and PC-98. I have seen both are often imaged with the .d88 file type.
I have found the specifications about the .d88 and ...
3
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Where could I find details about the FAT8 file system? [duplicate]
I am investigating file systems and I put my eyes into FAT8. I have been able to get some information from the Microsoft BASIC-80 v5 manual, but that's not enough to build an image manipulation ...
10
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2
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What is the earliest filesystem that is case-sensitive for filenames?
Among operating systems in usage nowadays, filenames in mostly unices (except macOS/iOS APFS, and Android) are case-sensitive, while filenames in Windows is case-insensitive. Unices are influenced by ...
3
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1
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IBM System/23 filesystem information
I have found and tested that the System/1, System/23, System/34, System/36 (all versions) and Displaywriter all use the same floppy format, from which I have found information at some ECMA documents.
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6
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2
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What was the initial size of the file allocation table for a newly-formatted hard drive in MS-/PC-DOS 3.3?
Every attempt to discover this yields only loads of information about drive geometries and maximum volume size.
Also, if an additional FAT is needed (fragmenting it), how big are the additional ...
4
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3
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Are there something like standard documents for 8.3 filename which explicitly mention about the folder names? [closed]
It should be that for 8.3 filename, the folder names should not have extension part as
the filenames do.
I just searched around and only found a Microsoft page for 8.3 filename.
It is quite tiny and ...
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2
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Did VMS ever acquire filesystem cross-links?
Both Unix and Windows, quite early, acquired cross-links in their filesystems, such that the filesystems are not trees, but general directed graphs. I'm curious about whether this was an inevitable ...
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3
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Since when does Windows support forward slash as path separator?
Historically, Windows used CR/LF and backslash, first for new lines, second for path separator.
But it turns out that it supports forward slashes as well:
Note that Windows supports either the ...
87
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7
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Who invented file extensions in file names?
Do we know when and where the idea of adding a suffix to filenames was conceived? I have found a lot of information about the history of specific file formats, but I am curious about when the need for ...
45
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Do any FAT8 filesystem images survive?
According to Wikipedia, the original FAT8 filesystem was developed by Marc McDonald in 1977 or 1978, as part of "NCR BASIC +6", a port of Microsoft BASIC to an 8080-based NCR data entry ...
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Why does Windows still use FAT and NTFS for filesystems? [closed]
Why does Windows use FAT (designed in 1977) and NTFS (designed in 1993, last changed in 2001), which are relatively old filesystems? Is there some sort of technical reason they haven't been able to ...
22
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2
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Origin of UNIX symbolic links?
When I search the web for information about the origin of UNIX symbolic links, I see "Symbolic links were first introduced into Unix with 4.1c-BSD". But when I go to fact check that, it ...
7
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2
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How did ‘logically-sectored FAT’ work?
While browsing online materials about the FAT file system, I occasionally came across mentions of ‘logically-sectored FAT’. This was apparently some kind of special mode of formatting a hard drive, ...
21
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Which is the first version of DOS to support more than one reserved sector in a FAT file system?
I'm trying to fix a problem when trying to use DOS stuff on SSDs. The problem is sector alignment in an SSD is completely different from what DOS expects, and writes to FAT do funny things when the ...