Disks may have their capacity divided into a few slices. A disk partition is a slice of the disk’s capacity.
- Partitions are independent of each other and can be managed entirely separately, meaning that in one physical hard drive you can have 1 partition containing Linux and another partition containing Windows.
- Each partition is formatted with its own file system.
Disk partitioning is the act of creating disk partitions.
- On Windows you’d use the Disk Management program. On Linux you’d use a utility like GParted, or a CLI like
fdisk.
For Linux, it’s common to have:
- One partition holding system files mounted on
/. - One for user data on /home.
- One swap partition.