Brooklyn Technical High School



Student Version L E S S O N P L A N #27 Per. Name:

CLASS: Computer Repair, Maintenance, Upgrade and Management DATE: Monday November 15th, 2010

TOPIC: Partitioning a hard drive

AIM: What does partitioning a hard drive do?

NOTE:

Today’s lesson discusses partitioning basic disks as opposed to dynamic disks.

H.W. # 27:

1) What is a partition?

2) What is a logical drive?

3) What are some reasons for partitioning a hard drive?

4) What is a Master Boot Record (don’t write down the acronym)?

5) What is a partition table?

6) What is a boot sector?

7) On a multi-boot system, which operating is boot up?

8) What is a volume boot sector?

9) What is a primary partition?

10) What is an extended partition?

DO NOW:

After installing the hard drive into a computer and going into CMOS to make sure that your drive was detected, what do you do next?

PROCEDURE:

Write the AIM and DO NOW.

Get students working!

Take attendance.

Go Over HW

Collect HW

Go over the Do Now

Partitions on basic disks are electronic subdivisions of a hard drive into a group of cylinders called partitions or volumes. These groups of cylinders can be thought of as their own drives; logical drives, as you would still have one physical drive. A computer with one physical drive can have anywhere from 1 to 24 logical drives; which are assigned the letters C through Z.

Question: Why can’t logical drives use the letters A or B?

What are some reasons to partition a hard drive? In other words, why would you want to break up your one physical drive into smaller logical chunks?

Some other reasons for partitioning hard drives:

1) The following story indicates the initial reason for partition hard drives. When the IBM PC came out, it used the operating system called DOS (Disk Operating System). The way DOS was designed (using the FAT16 file system which used the sector as the smallest storage unit), it was only allowed to address hard drives of sizes 32MB. (Comment: As we can see, the size of a hard drive that can be used in a PC depends not only on your system BIOS, but also your operating system.) When hard drives started approaching the 32MB limit, Microsoft had to have a way of handling drives bigger than 32MB. One solution they came up with was partitioning. When DOS 3.3 came out, Microsoft included partitioning capability to enable PCs to use larger physical hard drives by creating multiple logical drives, up to 32MB each (that 32MB limit has increased due to different file systems being used that don’t have that limit anymore.)

2) It is possible that you want or need a PC with multiple operating systems on it. You could have one OS on one partition and another OS on a different partition.

3) Sometimes it is your own personal way of organizing data. You may want your operating system on one partition and data and media on a separate partition. Sometimes this works out great if you have to back up your personal files, but not necessarily your operating system or your programs.

What happens when you partition a hard drive?

What two things are placed in the 1st sector of the hard drive?

What is the Master Boot Record (MBR)?

What is the Partition Table?

When your computer boots up, it looks for the very 1st sector of the physical drive, called the boot sector. The boot sector contains the Master Boot Record (MBR) and a partition table. The Master Boot Record is a tiny bit of code that takes control of the boot process from the system BIOS. (Basic Disks use a Master Boot Record). When the computer boots to a hard drive, BIOS automatically looks for MBR code on the boot sector.

The Partition Table states how the drive is partitioned. The MBR has only one job; to look for a partition in the partition table that has a valid operating system. Every partition in the partition table that has a valid OS, has a special setting called active that the MBR uses to determine which OS to load. Only one partition at a time can be made the active partition.

The boot sector at the beginning of the hard drive isn’t the only boot sector. Each partition has its very own first sector. These sectors are called volume boot sectors. While the main boot sector defines the partitions, the volume boot sectors store information important to each partition.

A hard drive may have up to 4 partitions, whether bootable or not. These partitions are divided into one of two types, Primary Partitions and Extended Partitions.

What is a primary partition?

What is an extended partition?

Primary partitions store the operating system(s). If you want to boot from a hard drive, it must have a primary partition. Therefore the MBR must check the partition table for a primary partition. In Windows 9x/Me and NT/2000/XP, the primary partition is C: and that can’t be changed.

|Master Boot Record |

|Partition 1 |Active |

|Partition 2 |Not Active |

|Partition 3 |Not Active |

|Partition 4 |Not Active |

If you want to dual-boot or multi-boot, you can use a third party tool such as System Commander 9 by VCOM. This third party tool takes control from the MBR and asks you which of the OSes you have in your primary partitions do you want to boot to.

Question

How many primary partitions can a physical disk have?

Your hard drive may or may not have the other basic disk partition type – an extended partition. Extended partitions are not bootable, and a hard drive can only have 1 extended partition.

Questions:

How many extended partitions can you have on one physical drive?

True or False: You can boot to an operating system from an extended partition.

If a hard drive has an extended partition, it takes up one of the areas of the primary partitions. You may only have up to three primary partitions on a drive with an extended partition.

Question:

A drive with a basic disk has an extended partition. How many primary partitions can this disk have?

After creating an extended partition, you then have to create the logical drives within the extended partition. For example, you may have one primary partition for your operating system and programs. You then wish to create an extended partition that will hold two types of information; your media files, and your documents and other data, such as Word, Excel, Notepad documents. So after creating your extended partition, you would then create two logical drives (D and E) within the extended partition. D is for your media files and E is for your documents and data. Whenever you need to back up your computer, you can simplify things by just backing up your logical drives.

Here is a picture of the above description.

Let’s take a look at some other partition examples:

Question:

Once a new IDE hard drive is installed in a computer chassis and CMOS has detected it, you must _____________

Partitions get their drive letters at every boot. There is an order in which partitions get their drive letter. Here is the order in which drives receive their drive letters.

1) Primary partition of the primary master drive

2) Primary partition of the primary slave drive

3) Primary partition of the secondary master drive

4) Primary partition of the secondary slave drive

5) All logical drives in the extended partition of the primary master drive

6) All logical drives in

the extended partition

of the primary

slave drive

7) All logical drives in

the extended partition

of the secondary master drive

8) All logical drives in the

Extended partition of the

secondary slave drive.

9) All non-hard drives attached

to an IDE controller (like CD-ROM Drives, ZIP Drives, etc.) get a drive letter.

If you are using SATA drives, this order still exists, but given that SATA no longer uses the concept of master or slave, the drive letter is based on the order you set in CMOS.

1) Primary partition of the first drive in the boot order

2) Primary partition of the second drive in the boot order

Keep going through the boot order for all the Primary partitions of the rest of the SATA drives!

3) All logical drives in the extended partition of the first drive in the boot order

4) All logical drives in the extended partition of the second drive in the boot order

Keep going through the boot order for all the logical partitions of the rest of the SATA drives.

If you’ve got both SATA and PATA drives, things get a bit complicated and boot order depends on your motherboard.

Newer CMOSes just let you pick whichever drive you want to be first and that will get its drive letter first.

Sample Test Questions:

1) A hard drive is divided into a primary partition and an extended partition. The are no other hard drives. The extended partition contains two logical drives. What is the drive letter assigned to the second logical drive?

A) C: B) D: C) E: D) F:

2) Two hard drives are installed in a system. The first hard drive has a primary partition, an extended partition and one logical drive within the extended partition. The second drive has one extended partition and two logical drives within the extended partition. What is the drive letter assigned to the second logical drive in the extended partition of the second hard drive?

A) C: B) D: C) E: D) F: E) G:

3) Two hard drives are installed in a system. The first hard drive has a primary partition, an extended partition, and one logical drive within the extended partition. The second drive has one primary partition, one extended partition, and two logical drives within the extended partition. What is the drive letter assigned to the first logical drive in the extended partition of the second hard drive?

A) C: B) D: C) E: D) F: E)G:

-----------------------

D:

1GB

One Primary Partition

One Primary Partition and One Extended Partition with two Logical Drives in the Extended partition

C:

1GB

C:

2GB

Drive 0

One 3GB Physical drive

Drive 0

E:

1GB

One 2GB Physical drive

Two 1GB Physical Drives

Drive 0

Drive 1

Drive 0 is Primary and 50% extended with one logical drive in the Extended. Drive 1 is all extended with two logical drives

C:

.5GB

D:

.5GB

E:

.5GB

F:

.5GB

Primary Drive

Secondary Drive

Slave

Master

Master

Slave

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