Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000–2005
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Chapter 7.
Hard Disk And File
Systems
There can be up to several tens of thousands of cylinders per disk. The greater the
amount of data that can be stored on one side of a disk,, the more cylinders can be
created on it and the larger the capacity of the disk.
This design has a lot of technical implementation peculiarities, but those issues are not
germane to this explanation.
A.2
Hard Disk Partition
After low-level formatting creates disk sectors, partitions must be created on the disk.
A
partition
is an area on a hard disk that can be used to install an operating system
and/or used as data storage. Creating separate sections on a disk is called
partitioning
.
(Think of slicing a pie into different pieces.) Disk partitions are analogous to separate,
physical disk drives and do not depend on each other. In fact, each partition can contain
its own operating system.
Different operating systems use
different data storage means — file systems
. The process
of creating a partition file system is called
formatting
. Each partition can have its own file
system.
Preparing a disk for use includes two stages: partitioning and formatting.
Partitioning is useful and often necessary because:
•
Different partitions can have different operating systems — for example, Windows
2000, XP and Linux.
•
Partitioning provides more effective disk space usage.
•
Partitioning enables you to separate system files from user data, making personal
information storage safer.
•
Partitioning provides more effective hard disk maintenance. In particular, more
effective data integrity control, file defragmentation and data backup.
A.3 Partition
Types
There are three main partition types:
•
Primary
•
Extended
•
Logical
