The data about the position and size of the partitions, also the indicator of the partition type is recorded in a small block at the beginning of the drive.This data is called the partition table.

The hard drive is split into several partitions. At many times,only the partition table gets damaged, so it's good to back-up the partition-table before doing risky operations.

There are two main kinds of partitions :

Quote:

1 - Primary partitions : The main difference between the Primary and Extended partitions is the fact that MS-DOS and older Windows versions can boot only from a primary partition.The limit for primary partitions is usually 4 for each hard driver.

2 - Extended partitions : The Extended partitions split into logical drives.Linux and newer versions of windows like WinXP and Win2K can boot from them. If the format of the partition (e.g. NTFS,FAT32,ext3) is recognizable in Windows,the Primary Partitions and the logical drives will show-up in My Computer.

Note : If you have purchased an copy of Windows with your Notebook/PC,you would have a hidden partition for the recovery purposes.The recovery partition would usually be either on the beginning(like ASUS notebooks) or at the very end (like some of HP laptops).If you have not been given a recovery cd, make sure to take the best care you can of this partition.

The Recovery partition is usually a FAT32 drive.With some kind of Windows installed on it.

The boot partition (the drive from which the bios tries to boot) is the recovery partition,it waits for the special key (e.g. F12 on ACER, F9 on ASUS),if the key is pressed the recovery partition brings up the recovery menu,if not after a few seconds it proceeds to booting from the first partition.

Doing Partition from scratch :

If you are doing partition from a completely blank hard-drive,you can do it with Ranish Partition manager, it's complete,free and runs under DOS. Another option is to do the partition using Linux,but remember, the vfat partition done by the Linux installer are not completely recognized by Windows so you might be forced to reformat them. You can also install Windows XP/2K on the empty drive and let it do the partitioning.If it,by some reason,formatted the whole drive into a single-large partition,you can resize it by the steps below. Some people might like to have their drives to exactly have 1,500,000 Kilobytes or something,this is usually impossible (except some special numbers),because this size depends on the number cylinders on the disk (the size of the cylinders is unchangeable)

How to Resize,Merge Partition :