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34 Ascentia M Series User’s Manual
Using the Hard Drive
Your computer includes a removable IDE hard drive. The IDE
hard drive can store the data and programs your computer uses.
The drive plugs into a connector on the system board.
Although the storage capacity of hard drives varies according to
model, any hard drive holds much more than a floppy disk does.
Also, the computer reads and works with a hard drive more
rapidly than with a floppy disk.
Once information is saved on a hard drive, it remains there until
it is overwritten. AST hard drive heads park automatically when
you turn off your computer.
The hard drive that comes with your computer
has already been formatted. Do not format the
hard drive. Doing so destroys all data contained
on the drive. If you need to format a new drive, or
want to erase all data on your existing hard
drive, refer to the manual for your operating
system.
Drives of more than 2 GB that ship with your computer are
divided into partitions. Each partition is 2 GB or less so that the
partitions can use a 16-bit file allocation table (FAT-16). The table
enables the partitions to locate files and directories.
Your computer recognizes each partition as a separate drive, for
example, if a hard drive has two partitions, they could be
recognized as drive C and drive D.
Although Windows 95 can work with FAT-16 or FAT-32 (a 32-
bit file allocation table), there are software compatibility issues
with FAT-32. Older software that you may have (16-bit
software) requires FAT-16 to run.
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