Hard drives, hard drives or SSDs, USB drives, SD cards and anything that has storage space needs to be partitioned. While non-partitioned disk cannot be used unless it contains one partition, a disk can contain multiple partitions.
Partitioning a disk is not something you do every day and normally on a normal PC you will not need to do anything, however it is important to know them, how to manage them, create them, extend them or merge two partitions so as not to have surprises when installing an operating system, changing discs, or creating a new drive.
What is a partition
Many hard drives have a single partition already set up, but they are born as unallocated and free space units.
To save files to the drive, it needs a partition .
The partition can contain all the hard disk space as almost always or only a part.
Partitions are needed to create at least one container with a file system.
After creating a partition, it is formatted with a file system that on Windows is NTFS type, on removable drives (USB sticks) it is FAT32, while on Mac it is HFS and on Linux ext4 .
We have said that it is possible to create multiple partitions on one disk .
This way the operating system will see the partitions as if they were two separate separate disks.
This is done, for example, to divide the operating system from other files and avoid "dirtying" the file system where it runs, for example Windows.
This way, when you reinstall Windows, you can clean and format the system drive by leaving your personal files in the other one that remains intact.
In many preconfigured and preinstalled computers there is a recovery partition, to be used to restart the PC and restore the factory settings when there are errors.
When you restore Windows, the files from this partition are copied to the main partition.
The recovery partition is normally hidden so that it cannot be accessed to ruin it (also to isolate it from viruses and malicious files).
Two or more partitions are also used in dual boot configurations, to install Linux on your Windows computer and have two independent systems to choose from when you turn on the computer.
Partitioned drives may appear as separate physical devices, but they are not and are always the same disk so there will be no benefits in terms of speed and performance and if you break the disk, you will lose all the partitions that are in it.
Partitions are of three types: primary, extended and logical .
A disk with a traditional partition table can only have a maximum of four partitions so extended and logical partitions are one way of overcoming this limitation.
The extended partition works effectively as a container that allows you to create more logical partitions.
if you needed to make six partitions, you would have to create three primary partitions, an extended partition and then three logical partitions within the extended partition, or you could even just create a single primary partition, an extended partition and five logical partitions.
These are borderline cases however because no one should need more than 4 partitions.
How to partition
During the installation of an operating system, Windows or Linux that is, the installer of the operating system will ask whether to create, delete, format or resize the partitions (keep in mind that deleting or formatting a partition will erase all the data)
To create partitions on Windows you can use external programs or from the disk management options of the administrative tools.
We have already written a guide on how to create partitions in Disk Management .
It is not possible to modify a partition while it is in use, therefore, for example, it is not possible to delete a Windows system partition, using Windows, but you will have to boot the PC from a CD or use an operating system installation disk.
We have seen in another article the best programs to format and partition disks, such as Easus Partition Master or Aomei Partition Assistant, with which you can also join two existing partitions without losing data, as long as they are contiguous (i.e. disks are indicated with following letters C and D or F and G).
Otherwise the only way to merge them is to cancel one, make it become unallocated space and then extend the other to take all the free space.
This can also be done to extend disk C where Windows is installed.
From Disk Management in Windows, right click on the partition to be deleted and choose the relevant option and then right click on the partition to be extended, without difficulty and risk.
Finally, note that when you clone a boot disk, perhaps to replace the disk or create an exact copy, you must always clone all the partitions of that disk.
READ ALSO: How to format USB sticks and hard drives: difference between NTFS, FAT32 and FAT
