Basic Knowledge in Disk Partition Management

With the rapid mushrooming number of PC users, we may know more and more vocabularies on computers and it is not easy to comprehend some basic concepts. As a matter of fact, your ease with these understanding will grow if you keep an eye on this article as some friends keeps asking me the same questions recently on this topic. This article mainly focuses on disk partitioning and the related vocabularies.

Disk partitioning is the act of dividing the storage space of a hard drive into separate data areas known as partitions. A partition editing program can be used to create, delete, format, move/resize, or modify these partitions. Some latest operating systems, like Win7, Vista, can do these jobs. You can also turn help to some popular softwares, like Partition Assistant to do this job.

You may ask how many partitions are there in the hard disk. In fact, the total data storage space of a PC hard disk can be divided into at most four & at least one primary partition. One of these partitions can also be an extended partition.

All these primary partitions are described by 16-byte entries that constitute the Partition Table which is located in the master boot record. A master boot record (MBR), or partition sector, is the 512-byte boot sector that is the first sector ( the LBA value is 0) of a hard disk partitioned data storage device. The MBR is not located in a partition; it is located at a Main Boot Record area in front of the first partition, so common users can’t access this area because this area belongs to firmware. But you can use professional tools to access and edit it. We can discuss this part in the future articles.

Well, we now come to understand what is a primary partition and extended partitions. A primary partition contains one file system. In MS-DOS and earlier versions of Microsoft Windows systems, the first partition (C:) must be a primary partition.

An extended partition is a primary partition which contains secondary partition(s). A hard disk may contain only one extended partition; which can then be sub-divided into logical drives, each of which is (under DOS and Windows) assigned additional drive letters.

For example, under either DOS or Windows, a hard disk with one primary partition and one extended partition, the latter containing two logical drives, would typically be assigned the three drive letters: C: for the primary partition, and D: and E: for the two logical drives.

To make a conclusion, today we may have a clear view of what are disk partitioning, MBR, primary partition as well as extended partition. Thanks for reading this article and hope to be some helpful to you.