Microsoft 1: Windows OS Intro Ch 9 Mass Storage

Myers CompTIA A+ Guide 7th edition

Partitioning is

the process of electronically subdividing a physical drive into one or more units called partitions.

• A partition is a grouping of blocks on a storage drive (and blocks are made of pages and sectors).  

• A hard drive can be partitioned in order to store more than one OS on the same computer. 

• Windows supports 3 partitioning methods: Master Boot Record (MBR), Windows proprietary dynamic partitioning scheme, and GUID Partition Table (GPT). 

Formatting a drive is

the installation of a file system onto a drive so the OS can store files and folders.

• Takes place after a drive is partitioned.

• Several file systems can be used by Windows.

Older hard drives had what size (in bytes) sectors and what do modern drives use for sectors?

• Older drives had 512-byte sectors.

• Modern drives use 4096-byte Advanced Format (AF) sectors

What are hard drive sectors?

The smallest addressable units of storage on a magnetic disk, SECTORS are subdivisions of tracks, the concentric circles that divide a hard drive platter. 

How are SSD pages and blocks related?

A Solid State Drive (SSD) is made of NAND chips, each storing millions of 4096-byte storage areas called pages, which are the smallest unit of data that can be written or read at one time.

A block is a group of pages (# of pages in a block varies but sometimes is 128).

Logical Block Addressing (LBA)

The hard drive uses LOGICAL BLOCK ADDRESSING to number every sector or page starting at LBA0 and calls these storage chunks blocks.

What are the 3 partitioning methods Windows uses?

Master Boot Record (MBR), Windows proprietary dynamic partitioning scheme, and GUID Partition Table (GPT). 

Basic Disk

A hard drive using either MBR or GPT partitioning.

Dynamic Disk

A hard drive that uses dynamic storage partitioning.

MBR Partitions 

Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning supports up to 4 partitions (up to 4 PRIMARY or 1 EXTENDED & up to 3 PRIMARY).

• Contains the Partition Table describing the # and sizes of partitions on the disk, and which partition contains the active OS. 

• Support PRIMARY PARTITIONS, which are bootable and usually assigned a drive letter (e.g. D:), and EXTENDED PARTITIONS, which can contain multiple logical drives each receiving a drive letter.

Why is the Windows root directory called the “C:” drive?

In early PCs, A and B were used by floppy drives.

A Partition Boot Sector (aka Volume Boot Record VBR) is

The first sector of a hard drive partition containing the code to load the operating system for that partition.

Dynamic Disks aka Dynamic Storage Partitioning is

A drive structure that can create a not-quite-unlimited # of volumes (aka partition), can implement RAID, and doesn’t use primary vs. extended.

A Simple Volume is

akin to a primary partition in that it is a division of a drive.

A Spanned Volume is

A volume that uses space across multiple drives.

• Risky.

• If any of the drives fail, the whole volume of data is lost.

A Striped Volume is

• RAID 0

A Mirrored Volume is

• RAID 1

• Requires free space on two drives, which will mirror each other to create redundancy.

• If one of the drives fail, the data is intact on the other.

RAID is

• Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

GPT Partitioning Scheme

• GUID Partition Table (GPT). GUID = Globally Unique IDentifiers.

• Up to 128 partitions, instead of MBR’s 4.

• Unlimited partition size, instead of MBR’s 2.2 TB limit.

A Swap Partition is

• Found only on Linux and UNIX systems

• For use when a system needs more RAM than is installed so it acts like RAM

Disk Management is

• A graphical partitioning program used in modern Windows OS.

• Replaced FDISK from the 80’s-90’s

• Found via the Quick Links Menu OR Administrative Tools > Computer Management

Registry

INSERT DEFINITON/DESCRIPTION HERE

Registry

A central hierarchical database core to every Windows OS which stores information necessary to configure the system, and options for the OS, hardware, and users

• Made of files called HIVES

• Shortcut: from run dialog REGEDIT

• For example, when a program is installed a new subkey containing settings, like the program’s location, version, and how to start, are added to the REGISTRY