Mike Meyers’ CompTIA

A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

Implementing Hard Drives

Chapter 12

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Overview
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• In this chapter, you will learn how to

– Explain the partitions available in Windows

– Discuss hard drive formatting options

– Partition and format hard drives

– Maintain and troubleshoot hard drives

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

Hard Drive Partitions

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Partitioning
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Process of electronically subdividing the

physical hard drives

– Windows assigns them names such as C: or D:

– A hard drive must have at least one partition

– Partitioning enables organization of a drive that

suits your personal taste

• One physical drive

– One or more partitions

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Essentials
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Two kinds of partitions: CompTIA A+

– Basic Disks Essentials
• Older style
• Readable by other utilities

– Dynamic Disks
• Proprietary Microsoft style

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A+® Guide to

Basic Disks
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Master boot record (MBR)

– Small amount of code that takes control of
boot process
• Partition table
– MBR looks in partition table for partition holding valid
operating system

– MBR and partition table

stored in boot sector

– Only one MBR per disk

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A+® Guide to

Basic Disks (continued)

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Support up to four partitions

– Can have four primary partitions or three primary
partitions and one extended partition
• Primary partition—can be bootable
– Stores the OS
– Uses a drive letter such as C:
• Active partition
– A partition must be made active to be bootable
• Extended partitions—non-bootable
– Can hold multiple logical drives lettered D: to Z:
– These logical drives can also be mounted as folders
with names
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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Partitioning
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

Primary partitions: Extended partitions:

– Store bootable – Extended partitions
operating system(s) are not bootable
– Disk can have up to – Disk can have only
four primary one extended
partitions partition
– Active partition is one – They can be divided
currently booted to into many logical
– Only one primary drives
partition can be – Strength is number of
active at a time drive letters that can
be used, D: to Z:

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Dynamic Disks
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Introduced with Windows 2000 (Server

and Workstation)
– Not available in XP Home Edition, Vista Basic, or
Vista Home Premium

• Partitions called volumes

– No limitation on number of volumes

• Added capabilities
– Spanned volumes
– RAID 0, 1, 5 on Windows Server products
– RAID 0 on Windows desktop products
• RAID covered in Chapter 11
• Other volumes covered in more depth later in chapter

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Other Partitions
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Hidden partition
– Primary partition hidden from OS
– Used to hide a backup copy of OS

• Swap partition
– Only on Linux and BSD systems
– Entire partition that works like page file in Windows

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

When to Partition
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Older OSs required partitioning before

installation
– Command-line program called FDISK

• Windows 2000/XP and Vista/7 include

partition tool in install program

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and When to Partition
(continued)
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• After installation
– Windows uses GUI called Disk Management
– Third-party tools available
• GParted (Linux tool
that works on
Windows partitions)
• Partition Magic

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Hard Drive Formatting

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Formatting configures a partition to hold

files and folders suitable to the OS

• Two major functions of formatting

– Creates a file system
– Creates a root directory

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

File Systems
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Windows supports three different file

systems

– FAT (often called FAT16)

– FAT32

– NTFS

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

File Allocation Table (FAT)

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• File allocation table (FAT) keeps track of the

sectors that store the various parts of a file

• 16-bit FAT (FAT16) uses 4 hexadecimal digits to

number the sectors
– 0000 thru FFFF

• FAT is like a two-column spreadsheet

– Column one numbers the sectors
– Column two contains the status of the sector
• Bad sectors = FFF7
• Good sectors = 0000

• Format creates the FAT and then writes to and

reads from each sector to see if it is good
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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

FAT Limitations
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• 16 bits can address only 64 K (216) sectors

• Sector sizes limited to 512 bytes

• 64 K × 512 bytes = 32 MB max. size in

early drives
– What to do to increase capacity?

• Solution was clustering, enabling partition

sizes up to 2 GB

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Clustering
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Clustering combines a set

of contiguous sectors and
treats them as a single unit

• Called a cluster or file

allocation unit
– Instead of numbering the sectors,
clusters were numbered
– Allowed partition sizes up to 2 GB

• Size of cluster increases

with the size of the
partition
– See chart on p. 376

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

How FAT Works

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Windows looks for the first cluster marked

0000 (good and available)

• If the file fits in that cluster, FFFF is put in

the status column

• If the file is larger than the cluster,

Windows finds the next open cluster
– That open cluster’s number is put in the first status field
to know where to link
– Process continues until the file is fully stored
– Last cluster’s status field is marked FFFF (end-of-file)

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Examples of FAT Storage

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

1 3

2 4

0000 = Good FFF7 = Bad FFFF = End of File

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Fragmentation
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Fragmentation occurs when files are spread

across clusters (not contiguous)
– Individual files are broken into pieces that fit into a
sector or cluster
– The pieces are stored on the hard drive but may not be
stored in contiguous clusters

• Fragmentation slows down the system

during hard drive reads and writes

• Programs such as Disk Defragmenter can be

used to defragment files, folders, or both

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Fragmented File
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Takes longer for system to piece

together and can impact performance

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A+® Guide to

Disk Defragmenter
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Can defragment disk

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

FAT32
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• FAT32 was introduced with Windows 95

OSR2 (OEM Service Release 2)

• Supports partitions up to 2 terabytes

• Uses 32 bits to describe each cluster

• Allows the use of small clusters

– See chart on p. 380

• Can still become fragmented

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

CompTIA A+
Practical Application

NTFS

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

NTFS
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• File system of choice today

• Six major improvements

and refinements
– Redundancy
– Security
– Compression
– Encryption
– Disk quotas
– Cluster sizing

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

NTFS Improvements
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• NTFS structure provides redundancy

– Uses an enhanced file allocation table called the
Master File Table (MFT)
• NTFS keeps a backup copy in the middle of the disk

• Security
– Provides file and folder access control
– Uses access control list (ACL) to restrict or grant
access

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and NTFS Improvements
(continued)
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Compression
– Enables files and folders to be compressed to
save space

• Encrypting file system (EFS)

– Enables files and folders to be encrypted and
unreadable to anyone without the key
– Essentially has integrated
security

• Files and folders can be

encrypted or compressed

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and NTFS Improvements
(continued)
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Disk quotas
– Can control how users
can use space
– Set on a per-drive basis

• Cluster sizes
– Can adjust cluster sizes
– Rare to do so
– NTFS supports 16-TB
minus 64 KB partitions
– MBR limited to 2 TB so
have to go to dynamic disk
for full capacity

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

Partitioning and Formatting

Process

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Bootable Disks
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Any removable media that has a

bootable OS installed

– Floppy, CD-ROM, USB thumb drive

– All Windows and Linux installation CDs are bootable

– Common to create bootable media with tools added

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Partitioning and Formatting

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• With Windows XP installation CD

– During text portion of install
– Can create one or more partitions

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Partitioning and Formatting
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition (continued)

• With Windows XP installation CD

– Enables you to set the size of the drive
– Minimum of 8 MB up to size of drive

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Partitioning and Formatting
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition (continued)

• With Windows XP installation CD

– Can format the drive with a file system
– NTFS Quick—not as thorough
– NTFS Regular—checks the drive

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Partitioning and Formatting
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition (continued)

• With Windows XP installation CD

– Can create multiple partitions

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Partitioning and Formatting
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition (continued)

• With the Windows Vista DVD

– Follow the screens
– No need to put in product key when prompted
initially
– Every version of Vista
is on the installation
disc
– The product key
determines installation
version

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Partitioning and Formatting
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition (continued)

• With the Windows Vista DVD

– Full drive selected by default
– Click the Drive options (advanced) button to get
options for creating
smaller partitions
– You can resize

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs Digression 101: Install the OS
Third Edition

• Can't play with partitioning without

loading Windows
• So, time to load Windows
– ATAPI optical drive installed on SATA controller
– Bootable Windows CD-ROM
– Adjust boot order in CMOS to make optical drive first
– Boot to the CD
– Toast any existing partition(s) on the hard drive
– Make a new partition of a modest size, such as
20 GB
– Follow the prompts and accept default settings to
install Windows

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Disk Management
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• GUI tool in Windows

– Used to manage partitions
– In Computer Management in Administrative Tools
– Can be launched directly with diskmgmt.msc

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs Disk Initialization
Third Edition

• All drives must be initialized before use

• Right-click disk in Disk Management and
select Initialize
• Status Indicator
– Unallocated = unpartitioned space
– Healthy = just what it sounds like
– Active = potentially bootable partition
– Foreign = newly connected dynamic disk
– Formatting = just what it sounds like
– Failed = big trouble

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Creating a New Partition

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Right-click in unallocated space and choose

New Partition

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

New Partition Wizard

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Disk Management
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Creating a partition in Windows

– Pick partition type, size, and assign drive letter
– < 4 GB can choose FAT, FAT32, or NTFS
– 4 GB to 32 GB can choose FAT32 or NTFS
– > 32 GB can choose only NTFS

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Creating a Logical Drive

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Once an extended partition is created, you may

create logical drives in it

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Dynamic Disks
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Dynamic disks are a type of storage

– Not available in all versions of Windows
– Can convert basic to dynamic
– Converting dynamic to basic
causes all data to be lost
– Regular drives are known
as basic disks
– Dynamic disks are divided into
volumes instead of partitions

– Home versions of Windows XP and Vista

do not support dynamic disks
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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Dynamic Disks (continued)

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Simple volumes (single hard drive)

C:\ Volume 10 GB D:\ Volume 10 GB

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Dynamic Disks (continued)

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Spanned volume (multiple hard drives)

– Simple volume spanned across multiple disks

D:\ Volume 10 GB E:\ Volume 10 GB

New disk—80 GB

– Effect is more space on E: volume

D:\ Volume 10 GB E:\ Volume 90 GB

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Dynamic Disks (continued)

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Extending a volume (one hard drive)

D:\ Volume 10 GB E:\ Volume 10 GB 30 GB unallocated space

– E: volume is extended to include unallocated space

D:\ Volume 10 GB E:\ Volume 10 GB 30 GB unallocated space

– Effect is more space on E: volume

D:\ Volume 10 GB E:\ Volume 40 GB

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Dynamic Disks (continued)

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Simple volume like a primary partition

• Striped volume (RAID-0)

• Mirrored volume (RAID-1)

• Striped with parity (RAID-5)

• Desktop products (2000 Pro, XP Pro)

– Support RAID 0

• Server products (2000 & Server 2003)

– Support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5
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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Mount Points
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Your system partition drive (typically C:)

may be made dynamic
– Cannot be extended or spanned

• Can create a mount point on C: or other

partition
– Drive that functions like a folder mounted into
another drive
– Provides additional storage on a hard drive by
creating a folder that holds another entire partition
– Partition or volume getting the mount point does
not have to be dynamic

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Creating Mount Points

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Right-click an unallocated space on a dynamic

disk and select New Volume
– The second screen in the wizard lets you create a
mount point instead of another drive letter
– Works like folder
but appears as disk icon

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Formatting a Partition
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Can format in Windows Explorer

• Can format in Disk

Management

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

Maintaining and Troubleshooting

Hard Drives

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Error-checking
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Error-checking scans for bad clusters on

hard drives
• Often referred to by old name of ScanDisk or
Run command of CHKDSK
– Also checks for invalid filenames and tries to fix
them
– Looks for lost clusters or chains that do not have a
filename associated with them and deletes them
– Checks the links between parent and child folders
– Launched via error-checking tools from Windows
Explorer

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Error-checking (continued)
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Can check the drive

• Can be set to
fix errors
automatically

• Can scan for and

recover bad
sectors

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Defragmentation
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Disk Defragmenter
– Consider using regularly (monthly or weekly)
– Will slow down system while running
– If not done, system will slow down due to
fragmentation
– Can be scheduled
– Called DEFRAG by
many techs and
by CompTIA

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Disk Cleanup
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Allows you to purge system

of unneeded files

– Files in the Recycle Bin

– Temporary Internet files

– Downloaded program files

– Temporary files

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Troubleshooting
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Three broad categories

1. Installation errors

2. Data corruption

3. Dying hard drives

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Troubleshooting Installation
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Connectivity
– Hard drive error
– No fixed disks present
– HDD controller failure
– No boot device available
– Drive not found
• Solutions include
– Checking the cables to make sure they connect properly
– Reseating the hard drive controller (if an expansion
card)
– Using autodetection in CMOS
– Checking the jumper settings
– Some PATA drives are incompatible on the same
controller
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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Troubleshooting Installation
(continued)
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• CMOS

– CMOS configuration mismatch

– No boot device available

– Drive not found

– Missing OS

– Solutions
• Always run autodetect in CMOS
• Always select LBA

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Troubleshooting Installation
(continued)
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Partitions
– Failing to partition
• Invalid drive specification error
– Making the wrong size or type of partition

• Format
– Failing to format
• Drive is not accessible
• Invalid media type
– ―Trying to recover lost allocation unit‖ indicates
the drive is dying

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Troubleshooting Corruption
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Data corruption
– Caused by many things such as power surges,
accidental shutdowns, viruses, and more

– Show up as
• File is missing or corrupt
• Download location information is damaged
• Unable to load file
• Cannot find command.com
• Error loading operating system
• Invalid boot.ini

– Try running error-checking utility

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Troubleshooting Corruption
(continued)
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Extract/expand
– Use to copy a
specific file from an
installation CD

– Many files located

inside a CAB
(cabinet) file

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and Troubleshooting Corruption
(continued)
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Corrupted data on bad sectors

– The built-in error correction code (ECC) checks

the drive for bad sectors

– Disk checkers can be used to fix problems

pertaining to corrupted data

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Troubleshooting Dying HDD

Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Dying hard drive

– The following sounds indicate a drive about

to die
• Continuous high-pitched squeal
• Series of clacks, a short pause, and then more clacks
• Continuous grinding or rumbling

– Boot drive issue would show up as ―no boot

device present‖

– Second drives simply do not show up

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to

Beyond A+
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

• Third-party partition tools enable you to

create, change, and delete partitions
without destroying the data

– PartitionMagic

– VCOM’s Partition Commander

– GParted
• Free (open source) license
• Linux only

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 Mike Meyers’ CompTIA
A+® Guide to
Managing and
Troubleshooting PCs
Third Edition

© 2010 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved