What is a Partition?

 

When researching hard drive recovery you can't help but hear about partitions. Though these are not very complex things, they must be understood before you can get too involved in data recovery.

When your hard disk's storage space is divided into smaller areas, these are known as "partitions". These are logical divisions on the drive which enable a single hard disk to act as more than one disk.

Partitions have a number of uses in today's computing. The most obvious of these is the fact that they can easily be used organize data. Since an unique partition can be given to a chosen entity or topic, they are very useful in a computer's hierarchical file structure. Another use of partitions is that they enable the drive to have more than one file structure on it. Each partition may only use one file structure, but because they are present you do not have to use one drive for FAT and one for NTFS, for example. Certain operating systems, like Linux, use a swap file which is generally placed in its own partition.

A hard disk's partitions are recorded on its master boot record, which resides on the first partition. The master boot record is the drives first 512-byte boot sector, this is where the drive contains its information necessary to boot any available operating systems.

In a Windows system the partitioning of the hard drive is designed around the C: which is were the operating system and programs are placed. Other data and even applications can be placed on other drives or partitions the but C: is the primary drive.

In Unix-based systems thing are not as standardized though almost all use a "/" partition, known as the root, and another, known as the swap.

Partitions can be created and resized in a number of ways. Almost all operating systems have ways to do this during the installation procedure, but it is also possible to resize/create partition later on. This can either be done using an operating system's included tools (Example: Windows' Disk Management) or aftermarket tools like PartitionMagic.