MECH 2301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 39: Disk Partitioning, Booting, Ntfs
MECH 2301 Lecture 39 Notes
Introduction
Primary and Extended Partitions
• The partitions themselves can be further divided conceptually into primary and
extended partitions.
• Each partition can have its own file system and directory structure.
• A disk partitioned into two separate file systems.
• Files located on other partitions are often invisible to the file system on an active
partition.
• Each partition in a Windows system, for example, is assigned a different letter and has
its own file system.
• A partition is selected by specifying the letter of the desired file system, followed by a
colon.
• Of course, all of the file systems are accessible to the file manager
• So that a user can open multiple windows, each representing its own file system, to
move data from one to another
• To perform other operations requiring simultaneous access
• The partition concept includes the option of providing separate operating system
facilities on different partitions
• So that each partition may have its own bootstrap loader, operating system, and file
management system.
• When this is the case, the file systems on different partitions may be incompatible with
each other
• So that it is not natively possible for one file system to read the directory or load the
files from a different partition, even on the same physical disk.
• In most cases, utilities exist that allow conversions between different file formats.
• For example, utilities built into Linux systems can read and write to Windows FAT and
NTFS file systems.
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