What are Drive Partitions?

Drive partitioning can give you greater flexibility with how you store your data. How does it work?

[OdinCal]

C: Drive is always happier than D: drive

[adamsaint]

Short stroking is massively underrated. If you need to boot from a mechanical drive, partitioning say 65gb of the start of the drive and installing the OS on that gives surprisingly good results. I have such a partition for a "safe" version of windows - with all the patches, spectre/meltdown mitigations, antivirus, office apps etc. I need for work and online banking etc. etc. It's not as fast as booting from my SSD but the overall experience is closer than you might think.

[hoseinqadam]

Some advice for guys who are partitioning your drives to have a separate storage volume outside of the OS partition, please note if you are doing a clean install of an OS (because something went wrong), wiping your HDD through the OS install wizard (the one that you use from booting to an OS disk) will wipe your entire drive. Yes I mean the entire drive will be wiped partition an all. I have learnt this the hard way when installing windows 7 on a partition thinking my other storage volume would have been okay (it was not).

[natanteam]

I was considering to abandon the partition idea, when in a beautiful day, (after a windows 10 update) my C partition got entirely corrupted! Simply got a message like "disk boot failure". I pulled the HDD off, and connected to another windows computer, to recover some data, and surprise: the C partition was blank and couldn't be read... Yep, no restore point, no recovery disk could save me... Fortunately, I had 99% of my data on my beloved D partition (which I also have an external backup). I also had I full image backup of my C partition, so I could successfully recover it. So, from now on, I'll keep advocating for the partition strategy.

[ChipMalfunction]

Just splashed water on my PC 2 hours ago, and it's back up and running, and this is the first video I'll watch since I saved it from certain destruction

[battlefieldwiz]

Thank you for this video. I’m in college for IT. Majoring in Cyber Security and Minoring in Programming.

Right now I am going over Partitioning such as GPT, MBR, Logical Partitions, Extended and what not.

This helped me understand it.

I am a computer geek but this is the only subject, for some reason, that has kicked my ass.

Thank you, Linus.

[MarkWhich]

It's always a good idea to isolate the beginning of the drive from the rest, even with a slave drive you could completely isolate your swap file, just enough for what it needs and you know it can it can never get fragmented.

[ganaraminukshuk]

"Where would we be without partitions in public bathrooms?"

That doesn't answer anything because the gaps between the doors are too frickin' wide!!

[BBand]

Public Service Announcement:
Do NOT Google "short stroking!"

[TheHoaxHotel]

Who do I talk to about bringing Windows 95 back?

[DeyvsonMoutinhoCaliman]

In the past PCs were so expensive that it was necessary specially so we could reinstall windows without messing our files. Windows was unstable back then also.

For partitioning, resizing partitions on the fly and cloning partitions I use MiniTool Partition Wizard. Incredibly fast and I never had problems like cloned Windows partitions that didn't boot.

[CyberiadPhoenix]

@techquickie Linux, Mac and BSD handle file systems differently.
Instead of showing up as separate drives (C:\ D:\ etc...) they show up as folders within the same file system, this is because they use mount points.
e.g. plugging a USB drive called "MemStick" would show up as something like "/media/(username)/MemStick" instead of E:\ like in Windows.

This allows you to treat multiple partitions, even those on different drives and different file-systems as a single directory structure.

A huge benefit to this is that you can have /home on different drive so that all user settings and files are separate from the OS whilst it still appearing to be a single drive.

A popular configuration is having the OS and applications on an SSD and all user data on a high capacity HDD.

[hokeypokeyy]

Thanks for this video ^_^ i'm currently studying for my CompTia A+ exam and I really just did not understand partitions. Now I understand way better and appreciate this useful info!

[essamahmod]

Hi can u tell me please how to delete OEM partition on my c:drive Without losing data thank you

[ahears]

I feel like you forgot to mention that partitioning is used in cloning, data recovery, logical volume management (LVM), partitioning can give greater flexibility for creating snapshots, adding/removing physical media to the partition, spanning a partition(s) across multiple physical devices, resizing for data storage (shrinking), resizing for data expansion, and various other storage schemes which are required in computing. I don't believe partitioning is a thing of the past, and only for those who want separate containers for things. This may apply to the Windows Centric Home Users but not anywhere else in my opinion, as the need for Disk Partitioning is alive in the Non-Windows Centric Technical/Forensic community as well as server space everywhere:)

[muskit_]

GParted bootable FTW - very useful in setting up multiboot

[danielsjohnson]

I'm so used to Linus using that tone of voice at 4:27 for sponsors that I thought it was a segue into a sponsor spot... and then he kept talking about partitions lol.

[Poire]

When Linus says at 1:00 that every partition has its drive letter, it is true only for MS Windows. Other OSs, such as Mac OS X and GNU/LInux, mount volumes onto folders or directories.

[stevodog]

the subtitles on youtube are so funny, they pick up Linus's Canadian accent. :)

[brofenix]

AOEMI Partition Assistant is the only free partition software that allowed me to resize my laptop partitions on my 1 hard drive, while the partitions had files in them, and not format the partitions :)