a partition is a unit of space within the media of the drive whose size and location is identifiable to the drive's controller and to the computer's BIOS and operating system. a partition could encompass the total capacity of the drive, but some BIOS and OS software impose limits on partition size. more often, several partitions are created that divide the space into spearate parts. this is a good idea when you are dealing with big hard drives

partitions can be summed up as to types:

- Primary

- Extended

hard drives can contain a maximum of four prmary partitions. to overcome this limitatino, youc an label one of these partitions as extended. and extended partison can contain many smaller paritions called logical drives

rhe record of all partition information for a given hard disk is sotred in the first readable sector of the drive. called the MBR, the MBR is kept separate from the partitions