What is FAT12?

FAT (File Allocation Table) is a table that an operating system maintains on a hard disk that provides a map of the clusters (the basic units of logical storage on a hard disk) that a file has been stored in. Developed by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald during 1976–1977, it was the primary file system for various operating systems, including DR-DOS, FreeDOS, MS-DOS, OS/2 (v1.1) and Microsoft Windows (up until Windows Me). And it is now widely used on many computer systems and most memory cards, such as those used with digital cameras.

The initial version of FAT is now referred to as FAT12, also called 12-bit FA. As a file system for floppy disks, it has a number of limitations: no support for hierarchical directories, cluster addresses were "only" 12-bits long (which made the code manipulating the FAT a bit tricky) and the disk size was stored as a 16-bit count of sectors, which limited the size to 32MB.

FAT12 supports disks up to 16MB.

See: FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS/NTFS5

 

Wondershare Data Recovery can restore files from FAT12 file system.