Disk partitioning is the process of separating the physical drive into logical pieces. Partitions can be useful to keep data separated, but multiple partitions are not always necessary.
Partitions are especially useful when you’re using and maintaining different operating systems on the same machine. You can create a separate partition for each operating system.
Formatted partitions are called “volumes” according to Microsoft’s nomenclature.
Disk paritioning is the first step when preparing disks. Disks may have been already partitioned and existing partitions may not always be compatible with your operating system.
Be careful when doing disk partitioning because it can cause data loss.
MBR Partition Style
MBR stands for Master Boot Record. Older operating systems used MBR partition style. In MBR style, there are two different partitions, a primary and extended.
Primary
The primary partition is the bootable partition. If you had different operating systems, the each OS would have its own primary partition. With MBR style, you could have a maximum of four primary partitions on a hard disk. You would allocate one of the primary partitions as being the Active one so the computer knows which one to boot from by default.
A primary partition can have only one logical drive.
Extended
The other type of partition in a MBR partition style, is the extended partition. This is used to create another partition that wasn’t necessarily bootable but you’d want to separate data into that partition. You could create one extended partition per hard disk and within that extended partition create additional logical partitions. It’s common to assign drive letters to each of these partitions. Logical partitions inside of an extended partition are not bootable.
Dynamic
Dynamic disk storage is available in most modern versions of Windows. Dynamic disk storage allows you to add multiple disks to your system and extend your partition across all the physical drives to create a large seamless volume.
With dynamic disk storage you can also split data across physical disks. This is called striping.
Additionally, with dynamic disk storage you can duplicate data across physical disks, which is called mirroring.
Not all dynamic disk options are available in all versions of Windows.
Basic
Basic disk storage is similar to the drives that have been used in DOS and Windows versions. Basic disk storage can be primary or extended partitions or logical drives. Basic disk partitions can’t span separate physical disks.
Logical
GPT
Modern systems use GPT partition style instead of MBR partition style. GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier. GPT is the latest partition format standard.
To use GPT, you need to have a UEFI BIOS. This allows you to have up to 128 partitions for a single storage device.
In GPT, there’s no need for extended portions or logical drives. All 128 partitions can be bootable.
GPT works with disks larger than 2 TB.
