How does the process of disk partitioning actually work on most HDD's?
- by Dark Templar
From what I know of most laptops, you are able to "partition" your disk into as many other drives as you please. The more you cut it up, the smaller your partitions are, but from an organizational point of view, this may be desirable...
I was wondering how the filesystem itself becomes partitioned underneath the partitions visible to the user. For instance, a laptop disk is usually divided into platters, each with two surfaces. The surfaces are further divided into "tracks". I guess what I am asking is, is it possible to identify how the disk itself keeps track of partitions? (whether each partition has its own platter? each partition has its own set of adjacent tracks? or some other configuration, or whether the data from different partitions are just randomly interleaved and scattered throughout the disk?)
