Partitioning Hard Disk Drives

Disk partitioning is a technique which can be viewed as a logical volume management. Partitioning allows multiple filesystems on a single hard disk. There are many reasons such as technical limitations, if one partition becomes corrupt, then the partition suffers and your whole hard drive.

To prevent overgrown log or other files from making the whole computer unusable, they are put on their own partition. Then only one partition will run out of space. Two operating systems cannot coexist on the same partition, or use different disk formats.

The drive is partitioned into different logical disks for different operating system. Most filesystems are used to write files to disk of fixed size clusters whose size is directly proportional to the size of the partition the filesystems is on.

There are various types of partitions such as active partition; in the active partitions the bootable flag determines the active partition. The active marker is used during boot and loads the MBR into memory and executes it, the MBR checks the partition table at its end, and locates the active partition.

Then it proceeds to load the boot sector of that partition into memory and runs it. Some operating systems require being installed on active partitions. For example, Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional marks its own partition active when it starts up. In logical partitions, logical partitions use Master Boot Record limitation of four partitions. One partition can be designated as an extended partition. This can contain up to 24 logical partitions, whose details are listed in the extended partition's own partition table, the Extended MBR or EMBR. Modern operating systems treat these same as primary partitions.

The other partitioning architecture is common; the partition tables are likely to stay for a while. A recent project of Intel and Microsoft developed the architecture which is based around the Itanium called the Extensible Firmware Interface has a component called GUID Partition Table. Microsoft has included GPT support in Windows Server 2003 SP1 and all variants of Windows x64 for data disks. However GPT disks are not yet supported by the x64 and x86 architectures so GPT disks still cannot be boot disks on these platforms.

Microsoft Windows with Windows the standard partitioning scheme is to create a single partition, in the C drive, the operating system, data, and programs all reside. It is recommended to create multiple partitions or use multiple hard drives with the operating system stored on one partition and the rest of drives are allocated to applications. A separate partition for the paging file should be made, contained on a disk not including the operating system although this does mean neither disk is likely to power down.

With a little bit of proportioning work, it is easy to achieve a condition where the operating system is not stored on C and the C drive does not even exist. The disadvantage of dividing the drive into small, can cause a user can fill up and run out of useable hard drive space, even though other partitions still have plenty of free space.

A good implementation in the partitions of hard disk should have intelligent decisions of how many partitions are needed in the disk. A partition is also useful for desktop use as it allows a clean a fresh install of another Linux distribution while leaving data intact.

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