Flying Elephant Software

Very often I am asked what is a partition and how does it differ from my computer’s internal hard drive? The reason people ask this is because partitions and hard disk drives are confused with one another. The answer or explanation to this is rather simple. The partition is a section of a computer’s hard drive. In most computers that are over five years of age the partition and the hard drive are synonymous in size. However, in more modern computers the hard drive is sectioned off into partition areas so as to better facilitate systems such as separate recovery and dual boot operation.

Another advantage to this method is that when one needs to recover lost data it is usually possible to recover lost partitions Windows has neatly divided. Obviously it takes less time to recover all of the data on a 100 GB hard drive partition as opposed to the full 640 GB of the drive. Further, we often need to recover formatted partition files based upon damage or corruption such as that from a virus which is limited to the specific partition area itself.