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In computer engineering, hard disk drive partitioning is the creation of logical divisions upon a hard disk that allows one to apply operating system-specific logical formatting.

Disk partitioning is a simple technique which can be viewed as a precursor of logical volume management.

Purpose

Partitioning allows one to have multiple file systems on a single hard disk. There are many reasons to do this including:

• Technical limitations (e.g. old versions of the Microsoft FAT filesystem that can't address more than a certain amount of hard drive space; old PC BIOSes that prevent booting operating systems located past a hard drive's 1024th cylinder)
• If one partition becomes corrupt, only that partition suffers and not your whole hard drive.
• On some OSes (e.g. Linux) the swap file is normally a partition of its own. When it is, systems with a dual boot configuration can make several OSes use the same swap partition and therefore save disk space.
• To prevent overgrown log or other files from making the whole computer unusable, they are put on their own partition. Then only one partition will run out of space.
• Often, two operating systems cannot coexist on the same partition, or use different "native" disk formats. The drive is partitioned into different logical disks for different OSes.
• Most filesystems write files to disk in groups of fixed-size clusters whose size is directly proportional to the size of the partition the filesystem is on. If a file's size is not a multiple of the cluster size, the last cluster in the file's group of clusters will have unused space that can't be used by other files. So, filesystems that use clusters will cause files to take up more space on disk than they do in memory, and larger partitions means larger cluster sizes and therefore more wasted space. Therefore, using several small partitions instead of one large partition can save space.
• Each partition may be customized to different requirements. For example, if you have a partition which is seldomly written to, you can mount it read-only. If you want to have very many small files, you should use a partition that has a filesystem with many inodes.
• On multi-user systems running Unix, you may want to prevent users from doing hardlink attacks. To achieve this, the /home and /tmp directories should be separated from the system files in e.g. /var and /etc.

Partitioning schemes

Microsoft Windows

With Windows the standard partitioning scheme is to create a single partition, the C: drive, where the operating system, data, and programs all reside. It is recommended, however, to create multiple partitions or use multiple hard drives with the operating system stored on one partition and with the rest of the partitions and/or drives allocated to applications and data. If possible, a separate partition for the paging file should be made, contained on a disk not including the operating system although this does mean neither disk is likely to power down. With a little bit of pre-partitioning work, it is easy to achieve a condition where the operating system is not stored on C and the C drive does not even exist. This may have the advantage that certain poorly designed viruses and trojans will not be able to overwrite key system files or take over the system. The "My Documents" folder, a "special folder" home directory, can be mounted to take up the entire free space on a separate partition.

UNIX systems

For UNIX-based and UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux, fancy partitioning creates separate partitions for /, /boot, /home, /tmp, /usr, /var, /opt and swap. This ensures that if one file system gets corrupted, the rest of the data (the other file systems) stay intact, minimizing data loss. This has the disadvantage of subdividing the drive into small, fixed-size partitions, so, for instance, a user can fill up their /home partition and run out of useable hard drive space, even though other partitions still have plenty of free space. A good implementation requires the user to predict how much space each partition will need; sometimes a difficult task. Typical desktop systems use the other convention; a "/" (root) partition containing the entire filesystem and a separate swap partition. A /home partition is useful for desktop uses as it allows a clean reinstall (or a fresh install of another Linux distribution) while leaving data intact.

List of partition utilities

• Apple's Disk Utility
• GNU Parted, fdisk, and cfdisk
• Symantec's PartitionMagic
• Mandriva's DiskDrake
• Acronis' DiskDirectorSuite
• TeraByte Unlimited's BootIt NG
• Microsoft's DiskPart and FDISK
• DIY DataRecovery's DiskPatch
• Ranish Partition Manager
• FIPS
• VCOM's Partition Commander
• Paragon Software's Paragon Hard Disk Manager
• Maxtor's Maxblast for Maxtor Disks
• Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools for Western Digital disks
• Seagate's Discwizard for Seagate Disks
• Coriolis Systems' iPartition

See also

• Logical volume management
• File system
• Physical formatting
• Master boot record
• Extended Master Boot Record

External links

• partitioning primer
• QTParted, a partition manager.
• GParted, a partition manager
• Simple partition instructions
• GNU Parted, a command line partition manager
• http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/index.html
• Andries Brouwer's partition types list
• Minimal Partition Table Specification
• Linux Partition HOWTO
• EFI specifications at Intel
• Microsoft discussion of GPT support on x64 and x86 platforms
• ATA Hard Drive Addressing and Capacity Limits

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