Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A block, a contiguous number of bytes, is the minimum unit of storage that is read from and written to a disk by a disk driver.The earliest disk drives had fixed block sizes (e.g. the IBM 350 disk storage unit (of the late 1950s) block size was 100 six-bit characters) but starting with the 1301 [8] IBM marketed subsystems that featured variable block sizes: a particular track could have blocks ...
The disk drives would measure the disk's "health parameters", and the values would be transferred to the operating system and user-space monitoring software. Each disk drive vendor was free to decide which parameters were to be included for monitoring, and what their thresholds should be. The unification was at the protocol level with the host.
C: — First hard disk drive partition. D: to Z: — Other disk partitions get labeled here. Windows assigns the next free drive letter to the next drive it encounters while enumerating the disk drives on the system. Drives can be partitioned, thereby creating more drive letters. This applies to MS-DOS, as well as all Windows operating systems.
Early BIOS versions did not have passwords or boot-device selection options. The BIOS was hard-coded to boot from the first floppy drive, or, if that failed, the first hard disk. Access control in early AT-class machines was by a physical keylock switch (which was not hard to defeat if the computer case could be opened).
A hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer. A hard disk failure may occur in the course of normal operation, or due to an external factor such as exposure to fire or water or high magnetic fields , or suffering a sharp impact or ...
The computer first executes a relatively small program stored in read-only memory (ROM, and later EEPROM, NOR flash) which support execute in place, to initialize CPU and motherboard, to initialize the memory (especially on x86 systems), to initialize and access the storage (usually a block-addressed device, e.g. hard disk drive, NAND flash ...
Drive mapping is how MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows associate a local drive letter (A-Z) with a shared storage area to another computer (often referred as a File Server) over a network. After a drive has been mapped , a software application on a client 's computer can read and write files from the shared storage area by accessing that drive, just ...
Fixed drives (such as hard drives) that are bootable may be called boot drives. CD-ROMs are the most common forms of media used, but other media, such as magnetic or paper tape drives, ZIP drives, and more recently USB flash drives can be used. The computer's BIOS must support booting from the device in question. One can make one's own boot ...