What is a Hard Drive Partition?
A hard drive is not always used as a single drive, but is often split up into multiple drives. This is accomplished prior to formatting, in a process called partitioning. As the name indicates, a hard drive partition is part of the drive, or a section, treated by the operating system as an independent storage area or drive. Hence, a 120-gigabyte (GB) drive can be partitioned into several drives, rather than being used as one large drive. This is handy for a number of reasons. For example, one can use a separate hard drive partition to install an alternate operating system (OS). If the two systems require different formatting schemes, this configuration can accommodate that. Programs and data can exist on a third partition to be used by either OS — whichever is active. A boot loader on the C:\ drive allows the user to choose which OS will boot. Many people like creating a separate hard drive partition for the OS, even when there is only one OS present. By loading the OS into the C:\ dr
A hard drive is not always used as a single drive, but is often split up into multiple drives. This is accomplished prior to formatting, in a process called partitioning. As the name indicates, a hard drive partition is part of the drive, or a section, treated by the operating system as an independent storage area or drive. Hence, a 120-gigabyte (GB) drive can be partitioned into several drives, rather than being used as one large drive. This is handy for a number of reasons. For example, one can use a separate hard drive partition to install an alternate operating system (OS). If the two systems require different formatting schemes, this configuration can accommodate that. Programs and data can exist on a third partition to be used by either OS — whichever is active. A boot loader on the C:\ drive allows the user to choose which OS will boot.
