I'm attempting to gather information on how the size of a drive correlates
with the HPFS system area.

What I've been doing is reading the SuperBlock to determine the number of
directory band sectors, which is the large structure in the middle of the
disk that has all the information about file and directory placement.

The other bits of data that could be considered the system area are the
freespace bitmaps for the 8MB data bands (or, rather, the 16 Kilosector
databands, which are 8MB with 512-byte sector drives), the hotfix sectors,
space directory block sectors, and sectors 0-19.

Adding all this up for one particular drive gives a bit over 3MB.  CHKDSK
reports 5248KB of system area usage (when run with the /F switch - without
that switch, CHKDSK always gives an incorrect figure).  That leaves me with
a hair over 2MB worth of system area that I can't account for.

This is on a completely empty 300MB drive.

Is CHKDSK incorrect, or is there something big that I'm missing?

Mike Ruskai
thannymeister@yahoo.com


... But how do we know your the REAL Angel of Death?

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