JCBS Hard Disk Partitioning tutorial

They had one or more rotating platters and a moving arm with read/write heads attached to it - one head on each side of the platter. The arm could move and stop at the certain number of positions.

When it stopped each head could read or write data on the underlying track. Every read or write had to be done in blocks of bytes, called sectors. Sectors were usually 512 bytes long and there were fixed number of sectors on each track.

The drives themself didn't have much electronics and had to be controlled by CPU for every single step. First CPU had to issue command to position the arm. Then it had to instruct the drive which head should perform read and from which sector.

After that CPU waited until the desired sector was moving under the head and started data transfer. This design was relatively simple and inexpensive.

First of all each Input/Output operation involved a lot of CPU attention and, also, the disk surface was used inefficiently.

It was convenient for the programmers to have fixed number of sectors on each track, but it was a waste of space, because the longer outer tracks could hold much more data than the shorter inner ones.

Later, when digital electronics became cheap, hardware engineers could resolve this problem.

When IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) disks came out they had a little processor on each drive.

This helped to free up CPU time by implementing more sophisticated set of commands. The disk space was also used more efficiently. Engeneers had placed more sectors on the outer tracks, but still provided software writers with a convenient "cubical" look of the disk by doing internal translation of CHS (cylinders, heads, sectors).

For example my old 340M disk has only two platters = 4 heads (sides), but it reports 665 cylinders, 16 heads (sides), and 63 sectors. In reality it, probably, has more then 4*63 sectors on each outer track and a little less than 4*63 on the most inner tracks, but we could never know for sure.

With the IDE disks CPU only has to tell the CHS of the sector that it wants to read and drive's electronics will position the heads and call back the CPU when it is ready to start data transfer.

The newest drives have even simpler interface. Instead of addressing sectors by their CHS (cylinder, head, sector) address they use LBA (Logical Block Addressing) mode.

In LBA mode a program has to tell only number of the sector from the beginning of the disk (all sectors on disk are numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, ... ). In addition to that new disks have internal buffers, where they can store many sectors.

This can speed up disk access a lot, because they could read data in buffer using all four heads at the same time.

Virtually all modern operating systems use LBA addressing, but the CHS notation is still around.

First of all MS-DOS, which is almost 20 years old, uses only CHS. Also some programs, like Partition Magic, would not work if partitions do not start at the cylinder or side boundary. And finally, it is easier to talk about hundreeds of cylinders than about millions of sectors. Therefore we will be using CHS notation throughout this discussion.

There are several things that you have to know about CHS addressing. Suppose that we have a 340M disk with 665 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors per track. Then the legal values for cylinder numbers are 0..664, for head (side) numbers are 0..15, and for sector - 1..63.

The maximum allowable values for CHS addressing mode are 0..1023, 0..255, 1..63 for cylinders, heads, and sectors respectively. If you multiply these values you will see that the largest hard disk that could be addressed with CHS is 8G. Therefore, if your disk is 12G many programs will see only 8G, because they use CHS.

All hard disks on all IBM compatible computers have the same way of partitioning. First sector of the disk, called MBR (which we will discuss in details later), contains partition table. This table has four records, each of them can describe one partition. In the simplest case we would have all disk space assigned to one partition, like in the following example:

Note that MBR occupies one sector at cylinder 0, side 0, sector 1 and partition starts on the cylinder 0, side 1, sector 1. The 62 sector gap between them was left unused, because we want all partitions to start at the cylinder boundary or, at least, on the side boundary. This is not required with LBA, but we need to follow this rule in order to make happy old software (MS-DOS for example).

Another important point that I want to make is that Operating System and File System are different things, which many people use interchangeably. Operating System is a piece of software which controls CPU and lets different application programs to run on the computer and use different system resources.

The File System is a way to organize files and directories on the hard disk. The confusion comes because every decent operating system has one or more of its own file systems and they become clousely associated.

In our example all we know is that we have FAT-16 file system. And we have no idea which operating system is installed on it. It could be MS-DOS 6.22, it could be Windows 95 or NT, or it could be all three of them installed in the different directories in the same partition.

If we put additional efforts we could even install there Linux, but it is usually better to have different operating systems installed in separate partitions.

Another reason to have multiple partitions is the security against computer crushes. For example, if the system crushes in such a way that FAT tables get corrupted you will lose access to all your files, because FAT table tells where each file is located on the disk.

The FAT table is so important that they decided to keep two copies of FAT table at the beginning of the disk. But in case if your have very valuable files, it, might be wise to create second partition with the separate FAT tables and keep there copies of your files.

However, do not rush to create the second partition. First of all, experience shows that 99% of errors damage only one copy of FAT and secondly if you lose your disk you can simply reformat the disk and reinstall all programs.

For the majority of users it would be sufficient to copy their personal work to the floppy once a week and keep it in the safe place. Now, regardless of the reason, let's analyse results of having multiple partitions.

In the second example we have two partitions with the FAT-16 file system. For some unknown reason makers of DOS decided that if you want to have second or third FAT partition you have to put them not in MBR but into the Extended DOS partition.

Extended partition appears like an ordinary partition in MBR (it occupies space) and inside it has a table similar to partition table in MBR, called EMBR (Extended MBR), which lists partititions enclosed in the extended partition.

Inside of extended partition you can have one more FAT partition and the reference to the next extended partition, then another FAT, and so forth, as long as you have drive letters for them (D:, E:, F:, ... ).

All those partitions have special name: logical drives, on contrary to the first FAT partition C:, listed in MBR, which is primary partition.

We can only speculate about the reasons for choosing such design, but there are two very obvious ones.

First one is that partition table has only four records and you couldn't have more than four partitions if you didn't have extended partitions.

To understand the second reason you have to know that, according to Microsoft, you can have only one primary partition on the disk and you cannot boot from the logical drives, which means that you cannot have more than one DOS-like operating system on the computer, which is another way to cut off the competitors. In fact, you can have more than one primary FAT partition and we will show later how to do that.

Also note that FAT tables in the second partition are smaller than in the first one. It oviously happens because the second partition is smaller.

The FAT tables has one entry for each cluster in the partition - it contains number of the next cluster in the chain. There is one chain of clusters for each file. Number of the first cluster of the file is stored in the directory entry for that file, along with file size, attributes, and last modification date.

Space for the directories other than root is allocated among the data clusters, just as if they were ordinary files. Only root directory has special location.

The name of the file system is FAT-16 because it has FAT (File Allocation Table) and also because each entry in FAT is 16-bits long (2 bytes).

This means that FAT-16 partition cannot have more than 65,535 clusters (2^16 = 65,536). Similarly FAT-32 has 32-bit entries and could address up to 2^32 clusters. (Actually they use only 28 bits).

Based on that we can calculatete maximum partition sizes for FAT file systems. Here is the table:

Cluster size	File system type
Cluster size	FAT-12	FAT-16	FAT-32
2K	8M	128M	512G
4K	16M	256M	1024G
8K	32M	512M	2048G
16K	64M	1G	2048G
32K	128M	2G	2048G

Partition size	Recommended file system / cluster size
1-16M	FAT-12 / 4K
16-256M	FAT-16 / 4K
256-512M	FAT-16 / 8K
512M-1G	FAT-16 / 16K or FAT-32 / 4K
1-8G	FAT-32 / 4K
8G and up	FAT-32 / 8K

The table below provides a comparison of volume and default cluster sizes for the different Windows file systems still commonly in use:

Volume Size	FAT16 Cluster Size	FAT32 Cluster Size	NTFS Cluster Size
7MB � 16MB	2KB	Not supported	512 bytes
17MB � 32MB	512 bytes	Not supported	512 bytes
33MB � 64MB	1KB	512 bytes	512 bytes
65MB � 128MB	2KB	1KB	512 bytes
129MB � 256MB	4KB	2KB	512 bytes
257MB � 512MB	8KB	4KB	512 bytes
513MB � 1GB	16KB	4KB	1KB
1GB � 2GB	32KB	4KB	2KB
2GB � 4GB	64KB	4KB	4KB
4GB � 8GB	Not supported	4KB	4KB
8GB � 16GB	Not supported	8KB	4KB
16GB � 32GB	Not supported	16KB	4KB
32GB � 2TB	Not supported	Not supported	4KB

The next example shows coexistance of DOS and Linux on the same disk and some more insights on the structure of the extended partition. Beginners can skip it and go to the next section.

First of all, this configuration could be derived from Example 2 if I we shrink both FAT partitions and then install Linux. Also you probably noticed that Linux native file system uses different way of organizing files than does FAT file system.

The main structure is called i-node table. There is one i-node allocated for each file. The i-node keeps file size, attributes and file creation, last modification, and last access times. Unlike FAT file system directories have only file names and i-node numbers.

The space allocation also differs from FAT, but it is out of the scope of our discussion.

If you study carefully cylinder numbers in the third example you will see that extended partition has three EMBR tables each one is stored at the beginning of the extended partition and keeps a record about FAT (or other) partition and the pointer to the next extended partition.

Note that first extended partition encloses all FAT and extended partitions, but all other extended partitions (level 2, 3, ... ) enclose only one data partitions.

And finally I want to say, that even though this was the real partitioning scheme on my hard disk it has some drawbacks. First of all, Linux swap partition is located at the end of the disk, far from the Linux root partition.

It turned out that disk heads kept going long way back and forth all the time, decreasing system performance. It is much better to place swap partition as close as possible to the partition where the OS is installed.

Also some people think that if they put Windows swap file into the separate partition computer will work faster. This is true only if that partition is located on the separate hard drive, which is faster or as fast as the first one.

Placing swap file on the old slow drive will not do any good. It is much better to set in the Control Panels fixed size for the swap file equal to the amount of RAM and place it on C:. Then you can run Norton Speed Disk which will optimize swap file.

When an Intel x86-based (or AMD equivalent) computer starts, sector 0, or the master boot record (MBR), is loaded from the first hard disk and executed.

Sector 0 contains the partition table and some code, or the master boot code (MBC).

The MBC scans the partition table for the single active partition and loads sector 0 from this partition into memory and executes it.

This sector may be a utility or diagnostic program or a boot sector containing boot code for an operating system.

The boot code starts the operating system in a manner defined by the operating system.

If a hard disk contains, for example, an Windows NT, a Linux, and an IBM OS/2 partition, a user can change which of these systems will be started by changing the active partition.
(If you are running MS-DOS, you can use FDISK to do this.)

Windows NT is started when a partition containing Windows NT boot code is active.

The Boot Loader enables you to choose which Windows NT installation is to be started, or to start the previous root-based operating system on the C drive.

The Boot Loader starts the root-based operating system by executing BOOTSECT.DOS, thus simulating the root-based operating system's ordinary boot sequence.

BOOTSECT.DOS is usually the MS-DOS (or OS/2) boot sector, but this is not necessary.

Each operating system provides one or more means of organizing data within partitions it recognizes.

Windows NT and Linux each use file systems that are unrecognizable by each other (in fact, latest versions of Linux recognize FAT partitions).

Operating systems that recognize and use the same file systems can share partitions, meaning that a user can see files on such partitions from whichever of the operating systems is currently running.

If an operating system does not recognize the file system on the C drive, then it follows that the operating system cannot reside on the C drive and therefore the Windows NT Boot Loader cannot provide that operating system as a selection on its boot menu.

Also note that MS-DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT could all reside on separate partitions, in which case the user could select among them by changing the active partition.

Or, as long as you keep the first partition FAT, you can have Windows NT and OS/2 on separate partitions, keeping only a bootable MS-DOS floppy for the times when you need to use MS-DOS.

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