Terminology

Microchip MDD File System Interface

MDDFS Interface Library Help
Terminology

A list of terms that may appear in this help file.

Topics
Name 
Description 
The boot sector is the first sector of a partition. It contains information about how the partition is organized. 
A cluster is a group of sectors in the data region of a FAT partition. The number of sectors per cluster can be any positive, power-of-two signed 8-bit value (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64) and is set when the partition is formatted. 
All file I/O operations (except those that accept a path variable) take place within the current working directory. When FSInit completes successfully the CWD will be set the the root directory. It can be changed using the FSchdir or FSchdirpgm function. 
A directory is a type of file that contains pointers to other files or directories. 
FAT 
The File Allocation Table. The FAT is an array-based linked list with one entry for each data cluster on the device. Each entry either points to the next cluster of a file or contains a special value. FAT12 has 12-bit entries, FAT16 has 16-bit entries, and FAT32 has 32-bit entries.
FAT can also refer to the FAT file system itself. 
The first cluster of a device. The master boot record contains pointers to different partitions on the device and information about how they're organized. 
The root directory is a directory that is the base of the directory tree. For FAT12 and FAT16 the root directory is located after the FAT; for FAT32 the root directory is make up of clusters (like a regular directory) and is located in the data region of the device. 
A sector is a group of bytes in the FAT file system. Sectors are most commonly 512 bytes. 
Microchip MDD File System Interface 1.2.0 - [Aug 18, 2008]
Copyright © 2008 Microchip Technology, Inc.  All rights reserved.