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B. A PATA converter to plug into the SATA bridge on the controller.

C. Nothing at all; he can just connect the PATA drive directly to the SATA controller.

D. He can’t do it; the SATA controller is not backward compatible with PATA drives.

10. What do you call a series of SCSI devices working together through a host adapter?

A. A SCSI controller

B. A SCSI chain

C. RAID

D. Cabled SCSI

Answers

1. B. A system running INT13 extensions can support up to a 137-GB hard drive.

2. D. Each controller supports two drives.

3. B. PATA drives use master/slave jumpers to differentiate between the two drives.

4. C. Nothing will be damaged or lost—there just won’t be any communication.

5. A. ATA/10 drives work fine with a 40-wire cable—they just won’t run at ATA/100 speed.

6. D. The maximum cable length of an internal SATA device is 1 meter.

7. B. Serial ATA is part of the ATA-7 standard.

8. D. There is no maximum number of SATA drives you can have on a system beyond the limits imposed by the number of ports on your motherboard/host card.

9. A. Simon needs a SATA bridge to plug into the connector on the PATA drive to connect his old PATA hard drive to the SATA controller.

10. B. A series of SCSI devices working together through a host adapter is a SCSI chain.

CHAPTER 12

Implementing Hard Drives

In this chapter, you will learn how to

Explain the partitions available in Windows

Discuss hard drive formatting options

Partition and format hard drives

Maintain and troubleshoot hard drives

From the standpoint of your PC, a new hard drive successfully installed is nothing more than a huge pile of sectors. CMOS sees the drive; it shows up in your autodetect screen and BIOS knows how to talk to the drive, but as far as an operating system is concerned, that drive is unreadable. Your operating system must organize that big pile of sectors so you can create two things: folders and files. This chapter covers that process.

Historical/Conceptual

After you’ve successfully installed a hard drive, you must perform two more steps to translate a drive’s geometry and circuits into something the system can use: partitioning and formatting. Partitioning is the process of electronically subdividing the physical hard drive into groups of cylinders called partitions (or volumes). A hard drive must have at least one partition, and you can create multiple partitions on a single hard drive if you wish. In Windows, each of these partitions typically is assigned a drive letter such as C: or D:. After partitioning, you must format the drive. This step installs a file system onto the drive that organizes each partition in such a way that the operating system can store files and folders on the drive. Several types of file systems are used in the Windows world. This chapter will go through them after covering partitioning.

Partitioning and formatting a drive is one of the few areas remaining on the software side of PC assembly that requires you to perform a series of fairly complex manual steps. The CompTIA A+ certification exams test your knowledge of what these processes do to make the drive work, as well as the steps needed to partition and format hard drives in Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

This chapter continues the exploration of hard drive installation by explaining partitioning and formatting and then going through the process of partitioning and formatting hard drives. The chapter wraps with a discussion on hard drive maintenance and troubleshooting issues.

Hard Drive Partitions

Partitions provide tremendous flexibility in hard drive organization. With partitions, you can organize a drive to suit your personal taste. For example, I partitioned my 1.5 TB hard drive into a 250-GB partition where I store Windows Vista and all my programs, a second 250-GB partition for Windows 7, and a 1-TB partition where I store all my personal data. This is a matter of personal choice; in my case, backups are simpler because the data is stored