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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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After you’ve successfully installed a hard drive, you must perform two more

steps to translate a drive’s raw media into something the system can use:

partitioning and formatting. Partitioning is the process of electronically

subdividing a physical drive into one or more units called partitions. After

partitioning, you must format the drive. Formatting installs a file system onto

the drive that organizes each partition in such a way that the operating system

can store files and folders on the drive. Several types of file systems are used

by Windows. This chapter will go through them after covering partitioning.

The process of partitioning and formatting a drive is one of the few areas

remaining on the software side of PC assembly that requires you to perform a

series of fairly complex manual steps. The CompTIA A+ 220-1002 exam

tests your knowledge of what these processes do to make the drive work, as

well as the steps needed to partition and format hard drives in Windows.

This chapter continues the exploration of hard drive installation by

explaining the concepts of partitioning and formatting, and then going

through the process of partitioning and formatting hard drives. The chapter

wraps with a discussion on hard drive maintenance and troubleshooting

issues, the scope of which includes all the operating systems covered on the

current exams.

Hard Drive Partitions

Before a magnetic disk drive leaves the factory, it is magnetically preset with

millions (hundreds of millions on really big drives) of storage areas known as

sectors. Older hard drives had 512-byte sectors; modern drives use 4096-byte

Advanced Format (AF) sectors. Figure 9-1 shows a close-up of a few sectors

on a typical HDD.

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