REVISING CONCEPTS

BY SEHRISH MAHMOOD
UNPARTITIONED SPACE vs. PARTITIONED
SPACE

 Unpartitioned space is basically all the

space of a drive that has not been
partitioned and formatted.
 You cannot install in an unpartitioned
space.
UNPARTITIONED SPACE-8MB

There is always an 8MB of

space that is left at the front of a
drive and is left unavailable for
use in the initial partitioning and
formatting of a drive.
UNPARTITIONED SPACE-8MB

 Ifyou have already partitioned the drive

from the following operating systems, the
unpartitioned space of 8MB is hidden:
 MS-DOS
Microsoft Windows 95
Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
Microsoft Windows 2000
UNPARTITIONED SPACE-8MB

The unpartitioned space 8MB

has following main three
functionalities:
1. This space is left so as to be able
to make the drive a "Dynamic
Drive“.
Basic drives vs. Dynamic drives
 Basic drives and dynamic drives differ in
one crucial respect. The basic partitions
are confined to one disk, and once you
set their size, it's fixed.
 Dynamic volumes overcome this
limitation because you can adjust their
size and you can add more free space to
them, either from the same disk or
another disk (multiple hard drives).
UNPARTITIONED SPACE-8MB

2. The space at the front of the physical

hard drive is not really empty, it
contains the meta-data necessary for
allocating and addressing the rest of
the disk.
3. This area also holds the meta-data the
System BIOS reads to recognize the
disk exists, and it can also be used to
store 'bad sector' locations.
BIOS
 The BIOS software has a number of different
roles, but its most important role is to load the
operating system.
 When you turn on your computer and the
microprocessor tries to execute its first
instruction, it has to get that instruction from
somewhere.
 It cannot get it from the operating system
because the operating system is located on a
hard disk, and the microprocessor cannot get
to it without some instructions that tell it how.
 The BIOS provides those instructions.