partitioning

Disk partitioning is the act of dividing a hard disk drive (HDD) into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions, to treat one physical disk drive as if it were multiple disks, so that a different file system can be used on each partition. A partition editor software program can be used to create, resize, delete, and manipulate these partitions on the HDD. A partition consists of a range of cylinders of HDD’i.e. each partition is defined by both a start and end cylinder (the size of cylinders varying from disk to disk).