<p>As you probably know a hard drive is to be split into one or
more partitions, since it cannot hold data until it is carved up and space is
set aside for an operating system. Until recently most PCs used to have just
one partition, which filled the entire hard disk and contained an OS. The situation
has changed however, thanks to new cost-effective high capacity hard drives,
thus opening up numerous possibilities for PC users, such as editing video,
archiving music, backing up CD images, etc. Huge increase in space is great,
but it poses a number of problems, most important of which are effective data
organization and speed.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Large drives are always going to take longer to search than
smaller volumes, and an operating system is going to have its work cut out both
finding and organizing files. It is for this reason that many people decide to
invest in multiple hard drives, but there is an easy solution û drive partitioning.
Partitioning lets you divide a single physical drive into a number of logical
drives, each of which servers as a container with its own drive letter and
<A class=glossterm x-use-popup=#POPUP38365 x-popup-type=expanding href='javascript:kadovTextPopup(this)' id=HotSpot38365>volume label</A><SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript1.2">kadovTextPopupInit('HotSpot38365');</SCRIPT>, thus enabling the operating system to process data more
efficiently. Besides partitioning makes it possible to organize data so that it
is easy to find and manage. You can set aside, for instance, 40 GB of a 160 GB hard
drive for the OS, 70 GB for storing video and another 50 GB for your favorite
music collections to provide transparent data storage.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is also worth mentioning to that with a hard drive
properly partitioned, such routine operations as files de-fragmentation or
consistency check will not be that annoying and time-consuming any more.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>By detaching the OS from the rest of the data you can tackle
one more crucial issue û in case of a system malfunction, you can get the
system back on track in minutes by recovering it from a <A class=glossterm x-use-popup=#POPUP15176 x-popup-type=expanding href='javascript:kadovTextPopup(this)' id=HotSpot15176>backup</A><SCRIPT type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript1.2">kadovTextPopupInit('HotSpot15176');</SCRIPT> image located on
the other partition of the hard drive.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>But that is not all drive partitioning may be used for. If
you are willing to play games in Windows while browsing the Internet in Linux,
100-percent sure that no virus will attack your PC, drive partitioning is a
necessity. In order to run several OSs on a single hard drive you are to create
a corresponding number of partitions to effectively delineate the boundaries of
<P>or Partition Label is a small textual field (up to 11 characters) that is located in the partition's boot sector. This value is used for notification purposes only. It is detectable by any partitioning tool including the DOS FDISK utility. Modern operating systems save it within a file system, e.g. as a special hidden file. Thus it is able to contain a relatively large amount of text in multiple languages.</P>
<P>The term backup originates from the time when the best way to protect valuable information was to store it in form of archives on external media. It's become now a general notion to mean making duplications of data for protection purposes.</P>
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