Your hard drive will hold more data if you can reconfigure it to reduce the size of its clusters. A cluster is the smallest standardised block of data Windows uses to organise data and files on the disk. Cluster sizes are fixed-4KB, 8KB, 16KB, or 32KB.

A file written to the hard disk occupies as many clusters as it needs. For example, on a hard disk configured with 16KB clusters, a 40KB file uses three-two clusters filled with 16KB of data, and the last filled with 8KB of data and 8KB of empty space. This doesn't seem like much until you multiply it by the thousands of files on a typical PC.

To reduce the waste of space, configure your hard drive with the smallest possible clusters. To determine your current cluster size, click StartòRun, type chkdsk, and press <Enter>. You'll see the size of your disk's clusters-which chkdsk calls "allocation units"-along with several other statistics.

If your disk already has 4KB clusters, you don't want to make them any smaller, but if the clusters are larger than 4KB, there are a couple of ways to shrink them.

The easier approach is to convert your disk from the FAT16 file structure to the new FAT32 scheme - assuming your disk isn't already configured for FAT32. Almost any system purchased new with Windows 98 or with the OSR2 version of Windows 95 should already be using FAT32, but systems upgraded to Windows 98 may still be using FAT16. To check your system's file structure, right-click the hard disk's icon in Explorer and select Properties (see FIGURE 3).

If your disk is using FAT16, go to the Disk Cleanup utility's More Options tab (mentioned above), and click the Convert button in the Drive conversion (FAT32) box. Third-party utilities such as PowerQuest's PartitionMagic also perform FAT conversions, and unlike the Windows utility, they can convert from FAT16 to FAT32 and from FAT32 to FAT16.

A FAT32 partition will support only the OSR2 version of Windows 95, not the original version. And some older software, especially older hard-disk utilities and file/data compression programs, won't work correctly with FAT32. Check with the software manufacturer for updated versions before converting.

If converting to FAT32 won't shrink your clusters, you can lower your cluster size by repartitioning your hard drive.

Partitions are subdivisions of a hard drive, each with its own drive letter. Many hard disks come with only one partition (and a single drive letter), but hard drives can have many partitions.

The size of the partition determines the size of the clusters used in it. Splitting a 2GB drive into two 1GB partitions using FAT16 could reduce cluster size from 32KB to 16KB and recover substantial disk space.

Windows' Fdisk utility lets you add partitions and alter their size, but only if you delete all the data on your hard disk. A third-party utility such as PartitionMagic lets you add, remove, and resize partitions much more quickly and easily.

By Kirk Steers