 After you’ve successfully installed a hard drive,

you must perform two more steps to translate a

drive’s geometry and circuits into something
usable to the system: partitioning and formatting.
 Partitioning is the process of electronically
subdividing the physical hard drive into groups
of cylinders called partitions (or volumes )
 A hard drive must have at least one partition, and
you can create multiple partitions on a single
hard drive if you wish.
 In Windows, each of these partitions typically is
assigned a drive letter such as C: or D:.
 After partitioning, you must format the
drive.
 Formatting installs a file system onto
the drive that organizes each partition
in such a way that the operating system
can store files and folders on the drive.
 Several different types of file systems are
used in the Windows world.
 Partitions provide tremendous flexibility
in hard drive organization.
 Partitions enable you to organize a drive
in a way that suits your personal taste.
 Partitioning enables a single hard drive
to store more than one operating system
(OS).
 One OS could be stored in one partition
and another OS stored in a second.
 Windows 2000 and XP support two different
partitioning methods: the older but more
universal master boot record (MBR)
partitioning scheme and the newer (but
proprietary to Microsoft) dynamic storage
partitioning scheme.
 Microsoft calls a hard drive that uses the
MBR partitioning scheme a basic disk and a
drive using the dynamic storage
partitioning scheme a dynamic disk .
 Basic disk partitioning creates two very small
data structures on a drive, the master boot
record (MBR) and a partition table , and
stores them on the first sector of the hard
drive—called the boot sector .
 The MBR is nothing more than a tiny bit of code
that takes control of the boot process from the
system BIOS. When the computer boots to a hard
drive, BIOS automatically looks for MBR code on
the boot sector.
 The MBR has only one job: to look in the partition
table for a partition with a valid operating system
 Allbasic disk partition tables support up to
four partitions. The partition table supports
two types of partitions: primary partitions
and extended partitions.
 Primary partitions are designed to
support bootable operating systems.
 Extended partitions are not bootable.
 A single basic disk may have up to three
primary partitions and one extended
partition. If you do not have an extended
partition, you may have up to four primary
partitions.
 Each partition must have some unique identifier
to enable users to recognize it as an individual
partition. Microsoft operating systems (DOS and
Windows) traditionally assign primary partitions
a drive letter from C: to Z:. Extended partitions
do not get drive letters.
 After you create an extended partition, you must
create logical drives within that extended
partition. A logical drive traditionally gets a
drive letter from D: to Z:. (The drive letter C: is
always reserved for the first primary
 partition in a Windows PC.)
 Every primary partition on a single drive has a
special setting called active stored in the partition
table. This setting is either on or off on each primary
partition. At boot, the MBR uses the active setting in
the partition table to determine which primary
partition to choose to try to load an OS. Only one
partition at a time can be the active partition ,
because you can run only one OS at a time.
 The boot sector at the beginning of the hard drive
isn’t the only special sector on a hard drive. The first
sector of the first cylinder of each partition also has a
special sector called the volume boot sector
 Primary Partition
• If you want to boot an operating system from a hard
drive, that hard drive must have a primary partition.
The MBR checks the partition table for the active
primary partition. In Windows 2000/XP, the primary
partition is C:, and that cannot be changed.
 Active Partition
• When you create a primary partition and decide to
place an OS on that partition, you must set that
partition as active. This must take place even if you
use only a single primary partition. Luckily, this step
is automated in the Windows installation process.
 Extended Partition
• The first versions of the old DOS operating system to
support hard drives only supported primary
partitions up to 32 MB.
• As hard drives went past 32 MB, Microsoft needed a
way to support them. Instead of rewriting DOS to
handle larger drives, Microsoft developers created
the idea of the extended partition. That way, if you
had a hard drive larger than 32 MB, you could make
a 32-MB primary partition and the rest of the drive
an extended partition.
 Extended Partition
• The beauty of an extended partition is in the way it
handles drive letters. When you create a primary
partition, it gets a drive letter and that’s it. But when
you create an extended partition, it does not
automatically get a drive letter. Instead, you then go
through a second step, where you divide the
extended partition into one or more logical drives.
An extended partition may have as many logical
drives as you wish. By default, Windows gives each
logical drive in an extended partition a drive letter
and most Windows users use drive letters.
 With the introduction of Windows 2000,
Microsoft defined an entirely new type of
partitioning called dynamic storage
partitioning, better known as dynamic disks.
 Dynamic disks drop the word partition and
instead use the term volume. There is no
dynamic disk equivalent to primary vs.
extended partitions.
 A volume is still technically a partition, but it
can do things a regular partition cannot do,
such as spanning.
 A spanned volume goes across more than one drive.
 Windows allows you to span up to 32 drives under a
single volume. Dynamic disks also support RAID 0 in
Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP
Professional. Windows 2000 Server and Windows
Server 2003 support RAID 0, 1, and 5.
 Dynamic disks use an MBR and a partition table, but
these older structures are there only for backward
compatibility. All of the information about a dynamic
disk is stored in a hidden partition that takes up the
last 1 MBof the hard drive
 Youcan use five volume types with dynamic
disks: simple, spanned, striped, mirrored,
and RAID 5. Most folks stick with simple
volumes.
• Simple volumes work much like primary partitions. If
you have a hard drive and you want to make half of it
C: and the other half D:, you create two volumes on a
dynamic disk.
• Spanned volumes use unallocated space on multiple
drives to create a single volume. Spanned volumes
are a bit risky⎯if any of the spanned drives fails, the
entire volume is permanently lost.
• Striped volumes are RAID 0 volumes. You may take
any two unallocated spaces on two separate hard
drives and stripe them. But again, if either drive fails,
you lose all your data.
• Mirrored volumes are RAID 1 volumes. You may
take any two unallocated spaces on two separate
hard drives and mirror them. If one of the two
mirrored drives fails, the other will keep running.
• RAID 5 volumes , as the name implies, are for
RAID 5 arrays. A RAID 5 volume requires three or
more dynamic disks with equal-sized unallocated
spaces.
 The partition types supported by Windows are
not the only partition types you may encounter—
other types exist. One of the most common is
called the hidden partition.
 A hidden partition is really just a primary
partition that is hidden from your operating
system. Only special BIOS tools may access a
hidden partition. Hidden partitions are used by
some PC makers to hide a backup copy of an
installed OS that you can use to restore your
system if you accidentally trash it—by, for
example, learning about partitions and using a
partitioning program incorrectly.
A swap partition is another special type of
partition, but it is only found on Linux and
BSD systems.
 A swap partition is an entire partition whose
only job is to act like RAM when your
system needs more RAM than you have
installed. Windows has a similar function
called a page file that uses a special file
instead of a partition. Most OS experts
believe a swap partition is a little bit faster
than a page file.
 Partitioning is not a common task. The two most
common situations likely to require partitioning are
when you’re installing an OS on a new system, and
when you are adding a second drive to an existing
system.
 Each version of Windows offers a different tool for
partitioning hard drives. For more than 20 years,
through the days of DOS and early Windows (up to
Windows Me), you used a command-line program
called FDISK to partition drives.
 Windows 2000 and Windows XP use a graphical
partitioning program called Disk Management .
 Linux uses a number of different tools for
partitioning. The oldest is called FDISK⎯yup, the
exact same name as the DOS/Windows version.
However, that’s where the similarities end, as Linux
FDISK has a totally different command set. Even
though every copy of Linux comes with the Linux
FDISK, it’s rarely used because so many better
partitioning tools are available.
 One of the newer Linux partitioning tools is called
GParted. GParted is graphical like Disk Management
and is fairly easy to use (Figure 9.8). GParted is also
a powerful partition management tool⎯so powerful
that it also works with Windows partitions.
 Before Windows 2000, there was no way to
do this nondestructively. As a result, a few
third-party tools, led by Symantec’s now
famous PartitionMagic, gave techs the tools
to resize partitions without losing the data
they held.
 Windows 2000 and XP can non-destructively
resize a partition to be larger but not
smaller.
 Vista lets users non-destructively resize
partitions any way they wish!
 RAID stands for Random Array of Independent
Device and is the process of making two or more
drives look like one drive.
 Three appreciated versions:
• RAID 0 Data is split between two drives. Fast, but if
one drive fails, all data is lost. Also called striping.
• RAID 1 All data is copied to two drives, with each
drive holding an exact copy of the other. Slow, but if one
drive fails, the other drive has all the data. Also called
mirroring.
• RAID 5 Data and special recovery information are
spread across three or more drives. If one drive fails, the
other two drives can recover all data. Also called striping
with parity.