User guide

110 | P a g e
PARTITIONS
To expand on partitions a bit, the most common question asked is exactly what is a partition?
Don't let the term scare you. To help clarify this, consider the floppy. When you work with
floppy drives, you have 100K, 500K, or perhaps a maximum size of about 1 megabyte. With
relatively small sizes such as this, you don't have to worry about size management of file s, or too
many files to fit on the directory. When you have a Winchester of 15 megabytes or so, it's very
large compared to a floppy. If you had only one 15 Meg Winchester partition you could not have
more than one operating system. When your directory would become "full" you may still have 13
Megs left on the disk, but too bad - as far as the directory is concerned, the disk is full. Want to
think about backing up one 15 Meg surface?
The partition utility SASIXUxx (HDOS and CP/M versions included), divides the physical Winchester
disk into up to 15 user partitions or "logical drives" for the selected ope rating system(s) you
have chosen under SASIXUxx. The 15 Meg unit, for example, is already set up as follows unless
another scheme was specified upon ordering the unit:
PARTITION # OPERATING SYSTEM SIZE
0 CP/M-A: 4.8 Megs
1 CP/M-B: 4.8 Megs
2 HDOS-SYO: 1.2 Megs
3 HDOS-SY1: 1.2 Megs
4 HDOS-SY2: 1.2 Megs
5 HDOS-SY3: 1.2 Megs
Besides these logical "drives", you can further have up to 15 USER NUMBERS or User areas under
CP/M to further sub-divide the CP/M partitions. User Numbers are very useful to use with a
Winchester, and it is highly recommended that you make use of them for maximum ease of use.
Consult your CP/M manual for additional information on user numbers.