User manual

service structures, thus maintaining the operating system’s working capability. In case of a system malfunction, the user

can get the system back on track in minutes. No additional configuration is required, what is very convenient.

The second possible application is the upgrade of a hard disk to a new one. The capacity of a modern hard drive doubles

every two years, thus opening up new possibilities for software developers. As a result programs become more

complicated and require considerable amount of free space. One day the user realizes that there is no more free space

left on the hard disk and the only way out is to upgrade. Usually that means that besides purchasing a new hard disk,

the user is to face a large re-installation procedure spanning several days of tedious work. But all of this can be avoided

just by copying the contents of the old hard disk to a new one proportionally resizing the partitions.

And the last but not least is the copying of hard disks for cloning purposes. It may be of great use when setting up

similar computers. There is no need for a system administrator to install an operating system from scratch on every one

of them. It is enough just to configure one and then clone it to the others.

Drive Partitioning

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.

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 – 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 volume label, 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.

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.

By detaching the OS from the rest of the data you can tackle one more crucial issue – in case of a system malfunction,

you can get the system back on track in minutes by recovering it from a backup image located on the other partition of

the hard drive.

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 each OS.

Data Sanitization

Data security is a two-sided problem. It is to be made clear, that providing confidentiality implies not only information to

be stored properly, but also be destroyed according to certain rules. The first step to protecting yourself is to know

exactly which security precautions work and which do not.