Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
With DOS, Microsoft Windows, and OS/2, a common practice is to use one primary partition for the active file system that will contain the operating system, the page/swap file, all utilities, applications, and user data. On most Windows consumer computers, the drive letter C: is routinely assigned to this primary partition. Other partitions may ...
The boot partition is a primary partition that contains the boot loader, a piece of software responsible for booting the operating system. For example, in the standard Linux directory layout ( Filesystem Hierarchy Standard ), boot files (such as the kernel , initrd , and boot loader GRUB ) are mounted at /boot/ . [ 1 ]
"Partition type GUID" means that each partition type is strictly identified by a GUID number unique to that type, and therefore partitions of the same type will all have the same "partition type GUID". Each partition also has a "partition unique GUID" as a separate entry, which as the name implies is a unique id for each partition.
The partition type (or partition ID) in a partition's entry in the partition table inside a master boot record (MBR) is a byte value intended to specify the file system the partition contains or to flag special access methods used to access these partitions (e.g. special CHS mappings, LBA access, logical mapped geometries, special driver access, hidden partitions, secured or encrypted file ...
The partition table supported up to four primary partitions. This did not change when FAT16 was introduced as a new file system with DOS 3.0. Support for an extended partition, a special primary partition type used as a container to hold other partitions, was added with DOS 3.2, and nested logical drives inside an extended partition came with ...
According to Microsoft, the basic data partition is the equivalent to master boot record (MBR) partition types 0x06 , 0x07 (NTFS or exFAT), and 0x0B . [2] In practice, it is equivalent to 0x01 ( FAT12 ), 0x04 ( FAT16 ), 0x0C (FAT32 with logical block addressing ), and 0x0E (FAT16 with logical block addressing) types as well.
Since PC DOS 3.3 (April 1987), there is another, optional extended partition containing the next logical drive, and so on. The MBR of a hard disk can either define up to four primary partitions, or an extended partition in addition to up to three primary partitions.
If there is more than one extended partition in a partition table, only the logical drives in the first recognized extended partition type are processed. Some late versions of the DR-DOS IBMBIO.COM provide a preboot config structure, holding bit flags to select (beside others) between various drive letter assignment strategies.