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Device configuration overlay (DCO) is a hidden area on many of today's hard disk drives (HDDs). Usually when information is stored in either the DCO or host protected area (HPA), it is not accessible by the BIOS (or UEFI), OS, or the user. However, certain tools can be used to modify the HPA or DCO.
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 ...
In particular, "hidden partitions" (those with their type ID changed to an unrecognized value, usually by adding 10h) are not. MS-DOS/PC DOS versions 4.0 and earlier assign letters to all of the floppy drives before considering hard drives, so a system with four floppy drives would call the first hard drive E:.
Microsoft reserves a chunk of disk space using this MSR partition type, to provide an alternative data storage space for such software components which previously may have used hidden sectors on MBR formatted disks. Small, special-purpose partitions can be allocated from a portion of the space reserved in the MSR partition. [1]
For hard disks with 512‑byte sectors, the MBR partition table entries allow a maximum size of 2 TiB (2³² × 512‑bytes) or 2.20 TB (2.20 × 10¹² bytes). [1] In the late 1990s, Intel developed a new partition table format as part of what eventually became the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). The GUID Partition Table is ...
The type of drive. 0xF8 is used to denote a hard drive (in contrast to the several sizes of floppy). 0x16 2 bytes 0x0000 Unused This field is always 0 0x18 2 bytes 0x003F Sectors Per Track The number of disk sectors in a drive track. 0x1A 2 bytes 0x00FF Number Of Heads The number of heads on the drive. 0x1C 4 bytes 0x0000003F Hidden Sectors
IBM in its 1983 release of PC DOS version 2.0 was an early if not first use of the term partition to describe dividing a block storage device such as an HDD into physical segments. The term's usage is now ubiquitous. [citation needed] Other terms used include logical disk, [4] minidisk, [5] portions, [6] pseudo-disk, [6] section, [6] slice [7 ...
The sector is the minimum storage unit of a hard drive. [2] Most disk partitioning schemes are designed to have files occupy an integral number of sectors regardless of the file's actual size. Files that do not fill a whole sector will have the remainder of their last sector filled with zeroes.