Understand Basic Concepts on Disk Partitioning

With the rapid development of economy and technology, now computers flow out around us. With them, we learn more and more vocabularies but not easy to have a thorough grasp of some basic concepts. As a matter of fact, your can ease to understand some basic computer hard disk knowledge on this article as some computer freshman bothered by the same questions. So pay attention to this article mainly focuses on disk partitioning and the related vocabularies, it sure helps you.

Partition means the operations of segmentation the storage space of hard drive into separate data areas, including create, delete, move, format and resize partition or modify these partitions. You can get these help in the latest operating systems, Win7 and Vista. Otherwise you can turn to the mature partition manager software, like Partition Assistant to do this job.

How many partitions exist in the hard disk, you may ask this question. In fact, the total data storage space of hard disk can be divided into four maximal & one primary partition at least. Each one of these partitions can also be an extended partition.

All these primary partitions are described by 16-byte entries that form the Partition Table stay at the master boot record. A master boot record (MBR), or partition sector, is the 512-byte boot sector that is the firsthand sector ( the LBA value is 0) of a hard disk partitioned data storage device. The MBR do nor spread over a partition but the Main Boot Record area in front of the first partition, generally users is prevent to this area because this area belongs to firmware. Only when draw support from professional tools, you can access and edit it. We shall discuss this part in the articles.

Right now, you come to understand what is a primary partition and extended partitions. A primary partition being one file system; and the primary partition must in the first place of MS-DOS and earlier versions of Microsoft Windows systems.

An extended partition is a new partition constitute with a lengthening partition from the primitive partition and the primitive partition. A HD may only contain one extended partition which can next be sub-divided into logical drives all assigned additional drive letters.

For example in DOS & Windows, the drive letters: C: typically assigns for the primary partition and one extended partition; D: and E: for the two latter logical drives.

Time for conclusion today, you should understand of disk partitioning, MBR, primary partition and extended partition. Thanks for reading this article and hope it helpful to you.