Hard disk is the computers main storage gear which used to save information.
Hard disk cannot be used directly and must be split.
And the split areas are called hard disk partitions.
In the traditionaldisk management, a harddisk partitionwill be divided into two categories:primary partition and extended partition.
The operating system can be installed in the Primary partition.
And it is the partition which can make computer boot.
Whats more, the partition can be directly formatted.
Then installing system and storing files.
The more partitions there are the more different places to make the files nature distinguishable.
According to more detailed nature, the files can be stored in different places.
Disk partitions can be regarded as a simple technology which is the predecessor of logical volume management.
In aMBRpartition table, there are only four primary partitions in a hard disk.
If you need more than four disk partitions, using extended partition will be a good choice.
And there will be three primary partitions at most and an extended partition in a physical hard disk.
Extended partition cannot be directly used.
It must be divided into severallogical partitions.
Numerous logical partitions can be divided from an extended partition.
However, the rule listed above protects the very part from been destroyed.
In some operating systems (such as Linux), swap file is a partition.
We should prevent excessive logs or other documents from filling the computer.
That situation may lead to the failure of the entire computer.
Putting them in separate partitions can only run out the space of a specified partition.
Two operating systems often cannot be installed on the same partition or use a different local disk format.
to make it install multiple operating systems, we can divide the disk into several logical partitions.
Many file systems use fixed cluster size to write files into a disk.
The size of these clusters is directly proportional to the size of the file system.
And the bigger the partition is, the larger the cluster size and the more space are wasted.
So, using several smaller partitions instead of a big partition can save space.
Each partition can adapt to different requirements.
For example, if a partition is seldom to write data, it can be loaded as read-only.
When running UNIX, you may need to prevent users from hard links attack.
to achieve this goal, /home and /tmp must be separated from system files under /var/ and /etc.
It is the most widely used disk partition format which won the most operating systems support.
But the FAT16 partition format has a disadvantage: low disk utilization efficiency.
In DOS and Windows system, the unit of disk file allocation is cluster.
So even if a file is very small, it also takes up a cluster.
All the rest space is idle, so this will lead to the waste of disk space.
So to solve this problem, Microsoft introduced a new disk partition format FAT32 in the Win 97.
FAT32
The using of 32-bit file allocation table makes the capacity of disk management greatly enhanced.
It breaks the limitation in the FAT16 that each partition has a capacity of only 2 GB.
Due to lower production costs, its capacity becomes bigger and bigger.
The change greatly facilitates the disk management.
Compared with FAT16, this can greatly reduce the waste of disk space, and improve disk utilization.
Firstly, it uses FAT32 to format disk partitions.
In addition, DOS does not support the partition format.
After using the partition scheme, you will be unable to use the DOS operation system.
NTFS
It has the features of good security and stability.
Whats more, file fragmentation will be greatly decreased.
It also can record users operation.
This setting can protect the system and data security.
You canconvert FAT to NTFSandconvert NTFS to FATsafely with the help of MiniTool Partition Wizard.
The Linux file system keeps the file index node number and the file name in the directory.
Each pair of file name and index node is called a connection.
A file has a unique index node number to match.
But for an index node number, there can be multiple file names to match.
Therefore, the same file on the disk can be accessed through different paths.
By default, Linux uses the file system like ext2 to assure efficient and stable state.
This is a fatal weakness in the tool of key industries.
Ext3 file system is developed from ext2.
And ext3 file system has been very stable and reliable.
It is fully compatible with ext2.
Users can make transition to a sound file system with log function.
This is actually the original intention design the log file system ext3.
And we can also use the disk management platform provided by the operating system to do the process.
In the Windows operating system, we can also use thediskpartto adjust disk partition parameters through instruction.
Non-DOS Partition
In hard disk, the non-DOS partition is a special partition form.
It separates an area from the hard disk for another operating system.
Only the non-DOSpartition operating systemcan manage and use the storage area.
Primary Partition
Primary partition is usually located in an area at the front of the hard disk.
The master boot program is a part of it.
If this section gets damaged, OS cannot boot from hard disk.
But after booting from the floppy drive or optical drive, the hard disk can be read and written.
Extended Partition
The concept of extended partition is more complicated.
And it is extremely easy to cause the confusion between hard disk partition and logical disk.
The forth byte of the partition table is partition key in value.
The bootable basic DOS partition larger than 32MB is with value 06.
Many people use this kind of value to encrypt a single partition.
And restoring the original value can make the partition back to normal.
