What are Disk Partitions?

Disk partitions are a way to divide a hard drive into smaller disks called logical disks. These logical disks will appear to the operating system (OS) as separate hard disks. Each hard drive must have at least one partition before it can be formatted. A Windows disk can have up to 4 partitions.

Reasons for Creating Partitions

There are three popular reasons for creating multiple partitions:

1. Separate the operating system from your data files: In this case, you could create two partitions and put Windows in the first partition and place all your video files in the second partition. This arrangement will help your system run faster, make it easier to protect your data, and simplify your backup procedures.


2. Run multiple operating systems from the same disk: You might put Windows XP on one partition and Linux on another partition. The system would typically pick the default OS to boot from, but there will also be a startup menu that will enable you to boot to the alternate OS.


3. Your operating system can't access the larger disks: If you're running MS-DOS or Windows 95, you have yet another reason to create multiple partitions. The MS-DOS FAT file system is unable to access the largest disks. The FAT32 file system solved that problem for a short time before it too was unable to access the largest disks. In these cases, you would divide your disk into several smaller logical disks that your OS is able to read.

Ways to Manipulate Partitions

• Copy partitions


• Resize partitions


• Create partitions


• Delete partitions

Best Partition Utilities

The most popular partition utility is Partition Magic.

A good alternative partition utility is Partition Commander.

Free Open Source Partition Utility

Microsoft Partition Utilities

Other Considerations

Unless you want to create a partition because your operating systems can't see the whole disk, there might be better ways to solve your problem other than partitioning your hard drive:

1. Bigger hard drives can be gotten for extremely good deals


2. Add a second internal hard drive


3. Get an external hard drive

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