Partitioning and Formatting

Partitioning:
Disk Partitioning is the process of logically dividing the storage space of a Hard disk into deparate areas commonly called as partitions or drives

• Primary
• Extened

Creating more than one partition has the following advantages:

• Separation of the operating system (OS) and program files from user files. This allows image backups (or clones) to be made of only the operating system and installed software.
• Having an area for operating system virtual memory swapping/paging.
• Keeping frequently used programs and data near each other.
• Having cache and log files separate from other files. These can change size dynamically and rapidly, potentially making a file system full.
• Use of multi-boot setups, which allow users to have more than one operating system on a single computer. For example, one could install Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or other operating systems on different partitions of the same hard disk and have a choice of booting into any compatible operating system at power-up.
• Protecting or isolating files, to make it easier to recover a corrupted file system or operating system installation. If one partition is corrupted, none of the other file systems are affected, and the drive's data may still be salvageable. Having a separate partition for read-only data also reduces the chances of the file system on this partition becoming corrupted

Formatting:

• Formatting is the process of creating file system on the partition
• A file system tells how the files and folders to be created are stored and retrived