Appendix b. partitions and file systems, B.1 hard disk partitions, B.2 file systems – Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 - User Guide User Manual

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Appendix A Hard disks and BIOS setup

Appendix B. Partitions and file systems

B.1

Hard disk partitions

The mechanism that allows you to install several operating systems on a single PC
or to carve up a single physical disk drive into multiple “logical” disk drives is called
partitioning.

Partitioning is performed by special applications. In MS-DOS and Windows, these
are FDISK and Disk Administrator.

Acronis offers a special application suite that will handle disk administration tasks. This

product is Acronis Disk Director Suite. It includes disk partitioning, multibooting, partition

recovery and other disk management applications.

Partitioning programs perform the following:

• create a primary partition
• create an extended partition that can be split into several logical disks
• set an active partition (applied to a single primary partition only)

Information about partitions on a hard disk is stored in a special disk area – in the 1

sector

of cylinder 0, header 0, which is called the partition table. This sector is called the master boot

record, or MBR.

A physical hard disk might contain up to 4 partitions. This limit is forced by the partition table

that is suitable for 4 strings only. However, this does not mean you can have only 4 operating

systems on your PC! Actually, existing applications called disk managers support far more

operating systems on disks. For example, Acronis OS Selector enables you to install up to 100

operating systems!

B.2 File

systems

An operating system gives the user the ability to work with data by supporting some
type of file system on a partition.

All file systems are made of structures that are necessary to store and manage
data. These structures are usually composed of operating system boot sectors,
folders and files. File systems perform the following basic functions:

• track occupied and free disk space (and bad sectors, if any)
• support folders and file names
• track physical location of files on disks