Which of the following best defines what occurs when you partition a hard drive?

Updated: 02/07/2022 by

When referring to a computer hard drive, a disk partition or partition is a section of the hard drive that is separated from other segments. Partitions enable users to divide a physical disk into logical sections. For example, allowing multiple operating systems to run on the same device.

With older file allocation tables, such as FAT 16, creating smaller partitions allows a computer hard drive to run more efficiently and save more disk space. However, with new file allocation tables, such as FAT32, this is no longer the case.

Which drive is the first partition?

On Microsoft Windows computers, by default the first drive (disk 0 or drive 0) contains the first partition is the C: drive.

What does a partition look like?

The best way to see what a partition looks like is to open the disk management tool.

Press the Windows key, type Disk Management, and then press Enter.

Note

A small amount of disk space allocated to a partition is unusable space and cannot be used to store data. For example, the picture below shows the Extra Volume (E:) drive, or partition, having a capacity of 5.86 GB, but the Free Space available for storing data is only 5.84 GB. The 20 MB (.02 GB) difference is space that is unusable.

Types of partitions

There are also several partition types. Below is a listing of partitions with a brief description.

Note

Some of these partitions may not be available in your partition utility.

Boot sector, Delpart, FAT, Hard drive terms, Hardware terms, Hidden partition, MBR, Virtual drive