![]() If you have another partition or disk, it gets “mounted” as a branch in a specific folder, usually /media or /mnt. The way Linux works is that it puts everything onto a tree. Linux - and anything resembling Unix, really – doesn’t quite work that way. If not, it’ll usually ignore them, or offer you the ability to reformat. If you have other drives, and they have a compatible file system, then it’ll read them as well. On Windows, things are pretty clearly cut: it lives on your disk, usually on one partition, and that’s that. This can cause changing drive letters if you switch between OSs or add or delete partitions later. First, the machine will number based on all primary partitions, and then by logical ones. In addition, the way partitions are numbered by the system depends on these types. There are ways to get around this, but the best thing to do is to plan properly beforehand with primary partitions. If extended partitions are so great, why not just use them? That’s because you can’t directly boot from anywhere inside an extended partition. You can make as many as you like there, as well as make it home to your non-OS sections. It serves as a hollow container for any number of smaller, logical partitions. But what if we want more than four? That’s where the extended partition comes into play. This limitation is due to something called the Master Boot Record which tells the computer which partitions it can boot from, and so primary partitions are usually reserved for operating systems. Any given hard disk can only have a maximum of four primary partitions. While there are tons of file system types, there are only three kinds of partitions: primary, extended, and logical. Only have one hard drive? That’s okay, because you can still install multiple operating systems on it without actually having another physical disk. The other useful thing is that you can have multiple partitions, each formatted with a different “file system.” A file system is a formatting of the disk into a table that the operating system can read, interpret, and write to. Never shall the two interfere, unless either you make them or the hard drive itself physically dies. The other could be running a very obsolete, security-hole addled Linux installation. One could have Windows installed, riddled with viruses and trojans. You can share one of those partitions on the network and never worry about people accessing information on the other. If you have a 1 TB hard drive partitioned into a 250 GB partition and a 750 GB partition, what you have on the latter will not affect the other, and vice versa. Partitions are really handy because they act as a sandbox. Think breaking a disk into two configuration parts. It’s a logical - as opposed to a physical - division, so you can edit and manipulate them for various purposes. ![]() Partitions are divisions in the formatting of the hard disk. ![]()
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