Windows 7: Fat16 in Windows7

Someone asked me whether Fat16 was supported in Windows 7. I did not know. Does anybody know?

Fat 32 and exFat not Fat 16 are supported in 7 due to what external hard drives and usb flash drives see by default often Fat 32. There's no support for Fat 16 however being far too old and obsolete for removable drives and devices. 2gb maximum size for Fat 16 volume making it useless for storage devices.

Thanks Night Hawk. The question was in context of a SD card that came from XP (which I believe supports Fat16) but the files could not be read in Windows 7. The person was not sure of the format though. Windows 7 shows nothing under filetype in Properties nor does it show that there is any data on the card (but there is).

That would need to be viewed on an XP system where any files could be copied off of it prior to any reformat for use on 7. 7 will simply prompt for formatting it upon detection.

Vista lacked support for Fat 32 there where you would use an installer program for any new external drive preformatted to Fat in order to access the drive or device while 7 saw Fat support brought back for use of external HDs and flash drives as well as card readers.

Yeah, that is actually what I recommended - to recover the files on a XP system and to reformat the card to Fat32. Thanks again.

You're Welcome! Even with a new flash drive seeing a Fat 32 volume or wnen using a 3rd party drive partitioning program you may still end seeing the 7 prompt to reformat at times.

you don,t need fat16.the only thing that matters that you get your sd card formatted on your pc to make it blank at the whole length.
download disk wipe v1.5 by google search
compatible with windos 7 x64
insert your sd card and select drive in the program
in says drive not regignezed but don,t mind that
go to disp wipe icon on the left and select your format.ntfs,fat ,fat 32 and format
in happens twice ,klick stop at the first time
than your sd card is blank and will be regognized on you mobile phone or camera on the full capacity of your sd memory card
it wood solve your problem
choose fat32

Thanks for the answer. But the problem was that he had a stick with data that was in fat16 - I think it came from win98 or so.