When a HDD is installed in a system, it must be saprated by creating partition before format the hard disk drive. Partitioning a drive means dividing the hard disk logically in more then one different drive. These logical drives are called partitions of hard disk drive. Once a partition is formed, then the particular partition can be formatted to use on the system. When hard disk partitions are created, user should locate or mention the total amount of space that you would be assign to that particular HDD partition from the total storage space of the drive.
In IBM PC architecture, the hard disk partition table in the hard disk drive’s Master Boot Record that lists in sequence about the particular partitions on the HDD. This HDD partition table is then additional divide into four HDD partition table entries, with every entries equivalent to a HDD partition. These four hard disk partitions are normally known as primary Hard Disk partitions. To rise above this limitation, computer programmer decided to insert a new type of HDD partition which is known as the extended HDD partition. By swap 1 of the 4 primary HDD partitions with 1 extended HDD partition, user can make an extra twenty four logical HDD partitions within the single extended HDD partition.
The HDD partition table is broken up into four primary hard disk drive partitions. The 4th partition, although, has been assigned as an extended hard disk partition. This permits us to create extra logical HDD partitions under one extended HDD partition.
Every HDD also has 1 of its probable four partitions ensign as an active hard disk partition. The active HDD partition is a special assigned to only single HDD partition that the MBR uses to start the system into an OS. As only single HDD partition may be set as the main HDD partition, to install multiple operating systems this can be done by installing a boot loader in the active HDD partition. When the system starts, it will read the Master Boot Record and examine the Hard disk partition that is assigned as active partition. This active partition is the single partition that contains the boot loader. When the OS boots off of this active partition the boot loader will start and allow to select the OS.