Operation Manual

Glossary
Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000–2005
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Partition. An independent area on a hard disk where a file system can be located.
A partition can be either primary or logical, depending on its position in the
partition structure. One of the primary partitions of a hard disk may be active. A
partition has the following attributes: type, beginning and size. Some partition
management software and boot managers allow for the hiding of partitions.
Information about partitions is stored in the partition table.
Partitioning. The process of creating the logical structure on a hard disk.
Partitioning is usually done with programs such as FDISK — a component of
DOS and Windows. Disk Administrator completely replaces FDISK where
functionality is concerned and allows performance of many additional useful
operations.
Partition structure. All the partitions on a hard disk make a tree with the root in
the MBR partition table. Many operating systems and programs assume that any
partition table but MBR can contain not more than one partition entry and one
table entry. This simplifies the partition structure greatly – all the logical
partitions form one chain.
Partition table. It is the table that contains the information about partitions and
links to other partition tables. A partition table cannot have more than four
entries. The main partition table is located in the hard disk MBR, and the other
partition tables are called extended. Partition tables are usually stored in the first
sector of a cylinder.
Physical disk. A disk that is physically a separate device. Thus, floppy disks, hard
disks and CD-ROMs are physical disks.
Primary partition. The partition, information about which is contained in the MBR
partition table. The majority of operating systems can be booted only from the
primary partition of the first hard disk, but the number of primary partitions is
limited.
Root folder. The folder where the folder tree of a file system begins. Starting
from the root folder, one can uniquely describe the file position on the folder tree
by sequentially naming all the intermediate nested folders, e.g.:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32.VXD. Here the WINDOWS folder is a subfolder of
the root folder, the SYSTEM folder is a subfolder of the WINDOWS folder, and
the VMM32.VXD file is located in the SYSTEM folder.
Sector. It is the smallest information unit on a disk that is transferred in a single
read or write operation. Usually a sector is 512 bytes in size. A sector on a disk
can be addressed two ways: via the absolute number (see absolute sector) or via
cylinder, head and sector number on a track.
System disk/partition is a disk/partition from which an operating system may be
booted. Such a disk usually contains the boot sector and system files of this
operating system.