How to find disk block that contains a file in FAT

Question

I am wondering how you can find a file in a FAT file system.

While in Linux there is a root block that tells me where the root is and I can just iterate through directory i-nodes and their blockpointers to find other other inodes from directory entries, there is no such thing in a FAT table. More than that, the idea of having iterating throughout all a linked list, I find it very confusing.

Can someone explain how we can find the disk blocks that contain the file in FAT?

Answer 1

It depends which FAT Version are you dealing with. Eg it's different of the numbers of clusters. But in general you can find everything important in FAT Specification . The chapter FAT Initialisatzion explain how to calculate the location of FAT. Another example you find here in OS DEV