User:NeddySeagoon/The Olde Way

= The Olde Way = This needs to be understood so that you can decide what is right for you. It may not be the process detailed here. This decision is difficult to change later.

In The Beginning
Once upon a time PCs only had 340kB floppy disk drives. Floppies are historically used without a partition table because the original MSDOS did not support the concept of partitions.

When hard drives were introduced, first 5MB and 10MB everything still worked. The FAT filesystem of the day could cope with 32MB. Once hard drives grew beyond 32MB, the space beyond was lost.

The Introduction of the Partition Table
To be able to use all of drives bigger than 32MB, the idea of breaking them into pieces "Partitions" was added to MSDOS, so the partition table was added and tools to manipulate it supplied to. A maximum of four partitions could be supported.

The Extended Partition
All was well until hard drives reached 128Mb. That required more partitions so the Extended Partition, which is just a container for other partitons was added.

The End of the Road for the MSDOS Partiton Table
Over the years, the MSDOS Partiton Table has been extended to address more space. It has a hard limit at 2.0GiB, so cannot be used on drives bigger than 2.0GiB without loosing the space beyond.

It had to be replaced, since it could no longer be extended.

The Global Partition Table
The Global Partition Table was introduced as a replacement for the MSDOS partition table. At the same time EFI replaced the traditional BIOS, as the traditional BIOS cannot read a Global Partition Table.