The partition is a piece of disk space, which is marked there by the system
ulitility embeded on the hard disk (cylinder 0, head 0 and sector 1, MBR) that contains detailed information on how the system is initialized.  It holds information about sizes and locations of partitions on the hard disk. A hard disk can hold several paritions each with different type of File Systems.

* The partition table contains the MASTER BOOT RECORD (MBR)

The partition information is started on offset 1BEH of master boot sector. Each partition entry is 16 bytes long. The total partition table is 64 bytes long.
Therefore partition table is limited to a maximum of 4 entries. That is 4 primary partitions that can be created on hard disks.

Due to the limited entries in Primary partitions there is The EXtended Partitions to solve this boundaries;
Master extended partition, the first sector of extended partition is not a boot sector, but another partition table, which is called logical partition table; which is limited to the extended partition.

Confused Now?

Every Primary partition must be Active or marked Active in order to be able to boot an Operating System. When a partition gets corrupted, an operating system can not be located or started. A Partition gets damages due to many issues. Virus Infections can trash the partition, a power failure can cause the partition to be zapped and disappear, computer accidental drop, high temperature can cause the partition to get corrupted along with the file structure.

Attempting a repair with off the shelf software can cause the data to be completely shredded,  do not ever trust your data with the inexperienced people. When you experience a data loss, you need to contact the  experts. Our data recovery doctors at Netcontrol.org knows what to do.

Give us a call, we can help.

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