FDISK command

In hard disk, partitioning is done by FDISK and high level format is by Format command. FDISK makes it possible for various operating systems to co-exist on a single hard disk. The two types of partitions are primary (bootable) and extended (non bootable).

The four IDE ports are Primary master, Primary slave, Secondary master and Secondary slave.

Windows 95 & MSDOS supports FAT 16 which allows not more than 65, 536 files per drive and maximum volume size of 2.1 GB. So partitioning is required for a 10 GB disk into 5 drives.

With FAT 32, a 2 TB (1 TB=1000 GB) hard disk, is identified by a single dive letter. Windows 9x cannot read NTFS. Drive letter allocations are C : First primary, D : Second primary, E : First extended and F : Second extended.

Partition magic software can do conversion of file systems (FAT, FAT32 & NTFS) without loss of data. One can undelete the partition, create, resize, split, move and merge partitions. Partition magic is faster than FDISK.