Glossary

It's a repertoire of character encodings that include (most of) the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters.

An acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. The ASCII standard is a seven-bit code with no parity guidelines, containing 128 code positions.

A dynamic storage made out of whole or part of physical disk to increase performance and reliability.

A hard disk may contain only one extended partition; the extended partition can be subdivided into multiple logical partitions. In DOS/Windows systems, each logical partition may then be assigned an additional drive letter.

Set of unique file properties, that allows

A virtual copy of a volume (logical drive) using a defined geometry that emulates a real logical drive or partition

A virtual copy of a physical disk using a defined disk geometry that uses real physical disk as a source but access it

Software layer that sits above assembled physical disks that were part of a hardware RAID system.

The information about primary partitions and an extended partition contained in the Partition Table. See Master Boot Record (MBR).

Name commonly used for the partition that contains the start-up files.

Part of a hard disc, floppy disc, or similar data storage device that contains code for bootstrapping programs (usually, but not necessarily, operating systems) stored in other parts of the disc.

See physical device.

Set of disk attributes that specify format, partitioning etc. of a disk

Abstraction at the user level to distinguish one disk or partition from another. For example, the path C:\WINDOWS\represents a directory WINDOWS on the partition represented by C:.

File that contains the records of every other file and directory in a FAT-formatted hard disk drive. The operating system needs this information to access the files. There are FAT32, FAT16 and FAT versions.

Method in which files are named and where they are placed logically for storage and retrieval in a computer. Under scope of this document, one of the Microsoft Windows file systems, such as FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS.

Partitioned space on a physical device.

Hard disk's storage space divided into independent parts.

Device for storing data, that can be connected internally (Hard Drive) or externally (USB Flash card, USB Hard Drive).

see Disk Geometry

All disks start with a boot sector. When you start the computer, the code in the MBR executes before the operating system is started. The location of the MBR is always track (cylinder) 0, side (head) 0, and sector 1. The MBR contains a file system identifier.

File that contains the records of every other file and directory in an NTFS-formatted hard disk drive. The operating system needs this information to access the files.

Name commonly used for the partition that contains the operating system files.

Software layer that sits above assembled physical disks that were part of a hardware RAID system.

First sector of a data storage device that has not been partitioned, or the first sector of an individual partition on a data storage device that has been partitioned. It contains code to load and invoke the operating system (or other standalone program) installed on that device or within that partition.