. . everyone was being advised to use FAT for the boot partition so it could be accessed should NT fail to boot. There were no easily available NTFS tools back then. This may not have been very valid advice, but it was commonly followed. I encounter a lot of 2-Gig NT machines that are crashing due to being out of disk space. I have to do another one next week.

Fortunately, the guy who was in charge of IS at that client disappeared without notice and without trace, because I off-loaded the partition I'm going to shrink to a Linux powered NAS (Network Attached Storage) box - he'd have had a heart attack knowing there was a non-Microsoft OS in house.

Users report a stunning increase in performance over the old Compaq Prosignia server.

Incidentally, several prominant NAS companies shifted to Windows when Microsoft came out with an appliance license. At least one has gone out of business (I read their throughput was dismal after the conversion), but others, including Dell, still sell such devices.

The Linux NAS boxes serve Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac and other clients, but the Windows ones are incompatible with Linux, Unix and Mac filenames. This is never mentioned in the literature. I heard about this from a guy who bought a Dell NAS to store Oracle data on and found it useless for that purpose.