All About Partitioning
IntroductionMay 29, 1999
By David Risley
Partitioning is one of the necessary steps to prepare a drive for use. It is the process of defining certain areas of the hard disk for the operating system to use. A volume is a section of the drive with a letter, like C: or D:. All hard drives must be partitioned, even if they will have only one partition.
A partition program writes a master partition boot sector to cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1. The data in this sector defines the start and end locations of each of the other partitions. It also indicates which of these partitions is active, or bootable, thus telling the computer where to look for the operating system.
All systems can handle 24 partitions, either spread out on the same drive or many drives. This means that one can have up to 24 different hard drives, according to DOS. DOS can't recognize more than 24 partitions, although some other operating systems may. The limiting factor is simply the availability of letters. All partitions must have a letter. There are 26 letters, A: and B: are reserved for floppy drives, leaving 24 letters available.
Although there are third party partitioning programs that boast added capabilities, DOS FDISK is the accepted program for partitioning. FDISK sets up the partition in an optimum way and allows more than one OS to operate on one system.
FDISK only shows two DOS partitions, the primary partition and the extended partition. The extended partition is divided into logical DOS volumes, each being a separate partition. The minimum partition size is one megabyte, due to the fact that FDISK in DOS 4.0 or later creates partitions based on numbers of MB. Partition size is usually limited to 2G. DOS versions earlier than 4.0 allow max partitions of 32 MB. Using the FAT32 system under DOS 7 and Windows 95 OSR2, max partition size is kicked up to 2 TB (2 TB = 2048 GB = 2,097,152 MB = 2,147,483,648 KB = 2,199,023,255,552 bytes).
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