Basic knowledge of computer hard disk partitioning

One, what is zoning?




The
partition is essentially a format for the hard disk. When we create partitions, we have set the physical parameters of the hard drive, specifying the master boot record of the hard drive (that is, the master boot records, generally referred to as MBR), and the location where the boot record backup resides. The information required for file systems and other operating systems to manage hard disks is implemented through advanced formatting, the Format command.




Before
installs the operating system and software, you need to partition and format your hard disk before you can use the hard disk to save a variety of information. Many people will think that since the partition must be divided into several parts of the hard disk, in fact, we can only create a partition to use all or part of the hard disk space. However, no matter how many partitions we divide, and whether we are using a SCSI or IDE hard disk, you must set the primary partition of the hard disk to active so that you can boot the system through the hard drive.





II, extended partitions and logical partitions:




The
dos and FAT file systems were initially designed to support up to 24 partitions on a single hard disk, using a C to Z 24 drive letter. However, the partition table in the master boot record can only contain up to 4 partition records, and in order to solve this problem effectively, DOS Partition command Fdisk allows the user to create an extended partition, and within the extended partition, create up to 23 logical partitions, each of which is assigned a single letter. Can be used by a computer as a stand-alone physical device. Information about logical partitions is stored in the extended partition, and the information for the primary and extended partitions is stored in the MBR of the hard disk. This means that no matter how many partitions the hard disk has, its master boot record contains only the primary partition (that is, the boot partition) and the two partitions of the extended partition. 3lian Material





three, partition format:





1, FAT16





To the computer old "bird", to this kind of hard disk partition format is most familiar with, most of us are through this kind of zoning format to know and step into the computer threshold. It uses 16-bit file allocation table, can support the largest partition of 2GB, is currently the most widely used and access to operating system to support the most of a disk partition format, almost all operating systems support this format, from DOS, Win 3.x, Win 95, win 97 to win 98, Windows NT, Win 2000/XP, and even the hottest Linux all support this partitioning format.





but FAT16 partition format has one of the biggest drawbacks, that is, the actual use of hard disk is inefficient. Because in DOS and Windows systems, disk files are allocated in clusters, and a single cluster is allocated to only one file, regardless of how much of the total cluster capacity this file occupies. And the size of each cluster is determined by the size of the hard disk partition, the larger the partition, the larger the cluster. For example, 1GB hard disk only divided into one area, then the size of the cluster is 32KB, that is, even if a file is only 1 bytes long, storage time to occupy 32kb of hard disk space, the rest of the space will be all idle there, which leads to a great waste of disk space. The larger the partition that the FAT16 supports, the greater the capacity of each cluster on the disk, and the greater the waste. So as the current mainstream hard disk capacity is increasing, this shortcoming becomes more and more prominent. To overcome this weakness of FAT16, Microsoft has introduced a new disk partition format FAT32 in the WIN 97 operating system.





2, FAT32





This format using a 32-bit file allocation table, so that its ability to manage the disk greatly enhanced, breaking the FAT16 for each partition's capacity of only 2GB limit, the use of FAT32 partition format, users can be a large hard drive defined as a partition, without having to be divided into several partitions to use, Greatly facilitate the management of hard disk work. Moreover, FAT32 also has one of the biggest advantages: in a partition not exceeding 8GB, each cluster capacity of FAT32 partition format is fixed to 4KB, compared with FAT16, it can greatly reduce the waste of hard disk space and improve the efficiency of hard disk utilization.





Currently, the operating system that supports this disk partition format has win 97, win 98, and win 2000/XP. However, this zoning format also has its drawbacks, the first is the use of FAT32 format partitions of the disk, due to the expansion of the file allocation table, running faster than the use of FAT16 format partitions of the hard disk is slower, and because the DOS system and some early application software does not support this partition format, so after the use of this partition format, Can no longer use the old DOS operating system and some old applications.





3, NTFS




The
NTFS partition format is unfamiliar to general computer users, which is the hard disk partition format of the network operating system Windows NT, and users of Windows NT must deal with this partition format. The obvious advantage is that the security and stability is extremely good, in the use of difficult to produce file fragments, the hard disk space utilization and software running speed are beneficial. It can record the operation of the user, through very strict restrictions on the user's rights, so that each user can only operate according to the privileges given by the system, and fully protect the network system and data security. However, currently there are not many operating systems that support this partitioning format, except for Windows NT, a newly listed win 2000 also supports this hard disk partitioning format.





But unlike Windows NT, Win 2000 uses the NTFS 5.0 partition format. The new features of NTFS 5.0 have disk quotas-administrators can limit the amount of hard disk space that a disk user can use, and "encrypt"-you can automatically encrypt and decrypt file data when reading and writing files from disk. With the popularity of Win 2000, the majority of computer users will gradually become familiar with this zoning format.





4, Linux




The
Linux operating system was the most popular in the IT media last year. Because the system is free software that can be loaded into a computer with little money, it has won many users. Its disk partitioning format is completely different from other operating systems and has a total of two formats: one is the Linux native primary partition and the other is the Linux swap swap partition. The security and stability of these two partitioning formats is excellent, and with the Linux operating system, the chance to crash is greatly reduced, allowing us to get rid of the nightmare that Windows often crashes. However, the operating system that supports this partition format is only Linux, and users who are not interested in Linux systems can only exclaiming.





Through the above introduction, I think you must know the common hard disk partition format. Then, make sure you set the partition format for your hard drive according to the operating system you need to install.