y0. :)

This is something I had going when I was working at Blackwell Publishing. I used to do a weekly newsletter, called "Nick's IT Tip Of The Week", that was basically a not-so-complex version of something to do with computers (RAM, defragmentation, bandwidth, TCP/IP Networking, etc).

Well, after I left Blackwell, a number of people asked me if I'd keep it going. I figured, why the hell not? I guess I'm a pretty good writer, and enough people seemed to be interested in it, so I might as well, right?

So here you go. The new home of Nick's IT Tip Of The Week. And if I happen to NOT update this site on a weekly basis, well... sorry.

Nick's IT Tip Of The Week

11 March 2003

Disk Partitions

Bear in mind that I deal basically with Microsoft systems, and occasionally Linux; this doesn't really apply to the Macintosh platform of computing.

Sometimes, you'll hear someone say that they have a problem with their computer, and will spout out something like, "Yeah, the FAT partition on my hard drive is corrupt." And then you might scratch your head and say, "What the hell are they talking about? Computers don't get fat!" Well, you're right. So let's start with the basics here.

A partition is defined, by Dictionary.com, as something that divides or separates, as a wall dividing one room or cubicle from another. In computer terms, that's pretty much exactly what it does, although it differs from a true physical partition in that there aren't walls in your hard drive.

Partition can be used, when dealing with hard drives, as both a verb and a noun. As a verb, it refers to the act of separating your disk into separate areas. As a noun, it refers to the actual parts of the hard drive that you have separated from each other. But why would you want to do that?

Well, there are a number of reasons. Older operating systems, such as Windows 95, can't handle large disks; instead, you would partition the disk drive into smaller chunks so the operating system can read it. Another reason to partition a drive is to keep the operating system on one part, and all your data on another.

Let's say you have a computer running Windows 2000, and it has a 20-gig hard drive in there. You know the operating system itself, Win2K, is going to take up about a gig and a half of hard drive space; you can partition the drive into two separate sections, one being, say, three gig, and one being seventeen gig; the 3 gig section (Called C:\) would be your OS drive, and the 17-gig section (called D:\), would be your data drive, where you kept all your files, music, and whatnot.

"That's cool", you're thinking, "but is that the only reason you'd partition a drive?" Well, no. One of the coolest things you can do with a computer is partition the drive so that you can run multiple operating systems on it.

"Huh?"

Yep. Just because your computer has Windows 2000 on it doesn't mean that that's the only Operating System it can run. Here's another example; take the 20 gig drive that we used above; this time, however, we'll partition it into two equal chunks of 10 gig each (NickNote: actually, it'll only be about 9.3 Gig each - an advertised 20 Gig drive is usually only about 18.6 Gig). On the first partition, you've got Windows 2000. On the second partition, you can put just about any i386-based operating system you want; Linux, Win95, Win98, Unix, FreeBSD, Windows XP. By an i386-based operating system, I mean an operating system that runs on the Intel-386-chipset architecture; this means, basically, Windows and *nix (Linux/Unix) - Macintoshes run on a different architecture (PPC).

"Wow", you're thinking. "But can the partitions talk to each other?"

Well, yes and no. They can, if they're formatted with the same file structure. I'm only going to talk about three file structures here; there are more out there.

FAT32: FAT stands for File Allocation Table; it's the way files and data are laid out on the actual sectors of the hard drive. FAT32 uses a 28-bit binary cluster (instead of 32-bit, which would be logical - the extra four bits are for 'reserved' space on the hard drive) to allocate data on the hard drive; this allows for ridiculously large hard drive spaces (up to two terabytes). However, FAT32 isn't very good at actually allocatin space, and consequently, you end up with a lot of what's called slack space (which is space that's reserved by a cluster, but unused).

NTFS: stands for New Technology File System, and is mainly used on workstations and servers (though XP Home does allow for NTFS on its hard drives). It has better cluster management than FAT32 and offers better security options. The drawback is that a FAT32 drive cannot read an NTFS drive, so if you have two partitions on your hard drive, one FAT32 and one NTFS, they can't read each other.

EXT2 is used for Linux filesystems. Its also capable of viewing FAT32 structures, though not NTFS. My laptop is a dual-boot WinXP / SuSE 8.1, and I can view the XP partition through Linux. Note, however, that FAT32 CANNOT view an EXT2 file system, even if it's on the same disk.

There you go, folks. Enjoy it, keep the ideas coming, and I'll try to get to you next week!

- Nick

Email Me!