Disk Partition

Partition a disk? What does it mean? We talked about hard drives and the ability to install operating systems like Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and also Mac, Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc..

Over the time, by increasing the sizes of the files used by the users and programs, changing the habits of users to use audio editing applications, video, images, etc, hard drives have grown enormously, increasing its capacity to overcome the current Terabyte. A hard disk of similar size can be uncomfortable to use, can produce losses in system performance and risks of total loss of information to find the operating system, applications and user files, as are all in one volume.

Some years ago Microsoft developed a solution that allowed to create new volumes or drives from the physical capacity of a hard disk. This technique allows you to print diagrams based on information within the physical structure of a disk that the operating system then interprets as units, assigning a letter identifier. This method applies to hard drives using specific software and is known as Partition.

Let's see how to partition disks and what are the considerations for our system to work properly with the new volumes created.

Nowadays any disk has to be partitioned, at least to create a partition. It must be created because is necessary to restructure logically the physical capacity. For example:

We bought a 160 GB disk. The same as the manufacturer has a certain number of sectors. The operating system can not access the drivers with the organization that owns the original hard drive, because it does not have an addressing system on those sectors that are compatible. This is because each operating system has its own mechanism to access the disk drives. Therefore we know the file system is FAT, NTFS, EXTENDED, SWAP, REISER, HPFS, etc. Not having a single logical organization common to all operating systems, you must specify which will be used, so one of the key stages in the process of partitioning is the selection of the appropriate file system.

On the other side of a hard disk you can use all its capacity to set limits or define different areas, who may even have different file systems. See the following figure:

Here has reserved a certain number of physical sectors for a file system and hence to an operating system. The second figure is the total distributed in several areas with different file systems.

It is also possible to create 3 types of partitions: primary partition, extended partition and logical drive. These are the original names given by Microsoft when they invented the system that came into MS DOS 4.0

Quickly whether a system we want to start (boot) you need to host your boot files or boot into a primary partition, which makes it essential to create a partition of this kind in almost every hard drive.

The extended partition is used to hold logical drives, and these receive the drive letters identifiers. Logical drives generally allow hosting and can not start an operating system.

In the next article we explore the programs used to create partitions and their differences.