HDCPM is not FAT aware. It utilizes code to search in the root directory of a FAT formatted medium in order to find the CP/M image files. Then it finds the LBA of the first sector of each file and passes it to the CP/M hard disk driver. The CP/M hard disk driver doesn't know anything about FAT or image files. It accesses the image file as if it was a real hard disk. It works on the sector level with LBA addressing so it expects the 'hard disk' to be a continuous block of sectors.<br />
A CP/M image file can easily become fragmented during its creation, especially if the hard disk is nearly full. I advice you to create/copy your CP/M image files to your FAT formatted hard disk/partition while it is still empty. HDCPM will never fragment a CP/M image file.<br />
{||-|[[File:Hdcpm-boot-m4.png|framelessthumb|HDCPM binary booting on M4 Board]]|}
==CP/M Plus disk/partitions==
You can also create one or more partitions in order to format them to CP/M file system and use them exclusively for CP/M. In such case you must make sure that the size of the partition is big enough to accommodate your file system.<br />