CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [181]
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NOTE Early versions of Windows (3.x and 9x/Me) called the page file a swap file. Most techs use the terms interchangeably today.
When to Partition
Partitioning is not a common task. The two most common situations likely to require partitioning are when you’re installing an OS on a new system, and when you are adding a second drive to an existing system. When you install a new OS, the installation CD at some point asks you how you would like to partition the drive. When you’re adding a new hard drive to an existing system, every OS has a built-in tool to help you partition it.
Each version of Windows offers a different tool for partitioning hard drives. For more than 20 years, through the days of DOS and early Windows (up to Windows Me), you used a command-line program called FDISK to partition drives. Figure 12-6 shows the FDISK program. Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista use a graphical partitioning program called Disk Management (Figure 12-7).
Figure 12-6 FDISK
Figure 12-7 Windows XP Disk Management tool in Computer Management
Linux uses a number of different tools for partitioning. The oldest is called FDISK—yup, the exact same name as the DOS/Windows version. However, that’s where the similarities end, as Linux FDISK has a totally different command set. Even though every copy of Linux comes with the Linux FDISK, it’s rarely used because so many better partitioning tools are available. One of the newer Linux partitioning tools is called GParted. GParted is graphical like Disk Management and is fairly easy to use (Figure 12-8). GParted is also a powerful partition management tool—so powerful that it also works with Windows partitions.
Figure 12-8 GParted in action
Traditionally, once you make a partition, you cannot change its size or type other than by erasing it. You might, however, want to take a hard drive partitioned as a single primary partition and change it to half primary and half extended. Before Windows 2000, there was no way to do this nondestructively. As a result, a few third-party tools, led by Symantec’s now famous Norton PartitionMagic, gave techs the tools to resize partitions without losing the data they held. Windows 2000 and XP can nondestructively resize a partition to be larger but not smaller.
In Vista, you can nondestructively resize partitions by shrinking or expanding existing partitions with available free space. Although undoubtedly handy, this is sometimes hampered by the presence of unmovable system files, such as the MBR. You can sometimes circumvent this problem by disabling such things as Hibernation mode and System Restore, but that doesn’t always work, and third-party tools remain necessary in many cases.
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NOTE This chapter explains how to partition a hard drive before it explains formatting because that is the order in which you as a PC tech will actually perform those tasks. You’ll learn all of the specifics of the various file systems—such as FAT32 and NTFS—when I explain formatting in the next section, but until then, just accept that there are several systems for organizing the files on a hard drive, and that part of setting up a hard drive involves choosing among them.
Hard Drive Formatting
Once you’ve partitioned a hard drive, you must perform one more step before your OS can use that drive: formatting. Formatting does two things: it creates a file system—like a library’s card catalog—and makes the root directory in that file system. You must format every partition and volume you create so it can hold data that you can easily retrieve. The various versions of Windows you’re likely to encounter today can use several different file systems, so we’ll look at those in detail next. The root directory provides the foundation upon which the OS builds files and folders.
File Systems in Windows
Every version of Windows comes with a built-in formatting utility with which to create one