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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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EXAM TIP You might see the terms basic partition and dynamic partition

on the CompTIA A+ 1002 exam. These mean, logically, volumes partitioned

as basic disks or dynamic disks, respectively.

A single Windows system with three hard drives may have one of the

drives partitioned with MBR, another with GPT, and the third set up as a

dynamic disk, and the system will run perfectly well. The bottom line? You

get to learn about three totally different types of partitioning. I’ll also cover a

few other partition types, such as hidden partitions, and tell you when you

can and should make your partitions.

Master Boot Record

The first sector of an MBR hard drive contains the master boot record

(MBR), code that informs the system about installed operating systems. To

clarify, hard drives that use the MBR partitioning scheme have a tiny bit of

data that is also called the “master boot record.” While your computer boots

up, BIOS looks at the first sector of your hard drive for instructions. At this

point, it doesn’t matter which OS you use or how many partitions you have.

Without this bit of code, your OS will never load.

NOTE Techs often refer to MBR-partitioned drives as “MBR drives.” The

same holds true for GPT-partitioned drives, which many techs refer to as

“GPT drives.”

The master boot record also contains the partition table, which describes

the number and size of partitions on the disk (see Figure 9-5). MBR partition

tables support up to four partitions—the partition table is large enough to

store entries for only four partitions. The instructions in the master boot

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