Partitioning

[Andrew]

I know I'm being very basic to all, but what is partitioning? Is it when
(for example), you can have a C: drive and a E: drive on the same
hard-drive, that acts as 2 separate drives?

[Dick W. Hartog]

Yep

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http://dick-hartogs.net
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[Alan Katz]

Yes. It is dividing a drive into separate "sections." It had to be be done
when the size of a drive was too large for the operating system and/or the
system BIOS to handle.

Some did it because they maintained that it speeded up accessing files,
because the heads that read the disk simply skipped over to the partition
which stored them, making for less seek time.

[Box134]

Yes, that's what paritioning is about. There are advantages to using
partitions. They help in organizing and protecting your data. If you're not
using FAT32, creating smaller partions makes more efficient use of your
storage medium - there's more of it!

To give you an example of the safety aspect of partitions, recently I
atttempted to use PartionManure 5.0, errr..., I mean PartionMagic 5.0 to
merge my C: and D: partions. It died and left me with an unbootable mess.
Both C: and D: directories were buried under a layer of folders created by
PartitionManure. I was able to format just my C: partition and re-load
Win98. That done, I moved all the buried folders on D: back to the top
level, thus saving the contents. If I'd had just one partition I would be
forced to format the whole disk.