Download Partition In personal computers, a partition is a logical division of a

Partition
In personal computers, a partition is a logical division of a hard disk created so that you can have different
operating systems on the same hard disk or to create the appearance of having separate hard drives for file
management, multiple users, or other purposes. A partition is created when you format the hard disk.
Typically, a one-partition hard disk is labelled the "C:" drive ("A:" and "B:" are typically reserved for
diskette drives). A two-partition hard drive would typically contain "C:" and "D:" drives. (CD-ROM drives
typically are assigned the last letter in whatever sequence of letters have been used as a result of hard disk
formatting, or typically with a two-partition, the "E:" drive.)
When you boot an operating system into your computer, a critical part of the process is to give control to
the first sector on your hard disk. It includes a partition table that defines how many partitions the hard disk
is formatted into, the size of each, and the address where each partition begins. This sector also contains a
program that reads in the boot sector for the operating system and gives it control so that the rest of the
operating system can be loaded into random access memory.
Boot viruses can put the wrong information in the partition sector so that your operating system can't be
located. For this reason, you should have a back-up version of your partition sector on a diskette known as
a bootable floppy.
File System
In a computer, a file system is the way in which files are named and where they are placed logically for
storage and retrieval. The DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX-based operating systems all have
file systems in which files are placed somewhere in a hierarchical (tree) structure. A file is placed in a
directory (folder in Windows) or subdirectory at the desired place in the tree structure.
File systems specify conventions for naming files. These conventions include the maximum number of
characters in a name, which characters can be used, and, in some systems, how long the file name suffix
can be. A file system also includes a format for specifying the path to a file through the structure of
directories.
Journaled File System
A journaling file system is a fault-resilient file system in which data integrity is ensured because updates to
directories and bitmaps are constantly written to a serial log on disk before the original disk log is updated.
In the event of a system failure, a full journaling filesystem ensures that the data on the disk has been
restored to its pre-crash configuration. It also recovers unsaved data and stores it in the location where it
would have gone if the computer had not crashed, making it an important feature for mission-critical
applications.
Not all operating systems provide the same journaling technology. Windows NT offers a less robust
version of the full system. If your Windows NT system crashes, you may not lose the entire disk volume,
but you will likely lose all the data that hadn't yet been written to the disk prior to the crash. By the same
token, the default Linux system, ext2fs, does not journal at all. That means, a system crash--although
infrequent in a Linux environment--can corrupt an entire disk volume.
The earliest journaling file systems, created in the mid-1980s, included Veritas, Tolerant, and IBM's JFS.
With increasing demands being placed on file systems to support terabytes of data, thousands upon
thousands of files per directory and 64-bit capability, it is expected that interest will continue to grow in
high-performance journaling file systems like XFS.
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