Working with media - Partitioning

Partitions are used for breaking a physical drive into one or more logical drives. Each logical drive can then be accessed as if it were a separate physically disk. Users may create separate partitions so as to separate operating system (OS) data from user data. In some instances, it may be to use multiple OSes or even to run different file systems on one hard drive. Data about the partitions is stored in a partition table at the very start of the disk.  (access.redhat.com, n.d.) 

The image below shows a drive which has been partitioned into 2. In this case the two partitions are formatted as ext4 and ntfs. So the single disk /dev/sdb now has 2 partitions /dev/sdb1 partitions as ext4 and /dev/sdb2 partitioned as NTFS 

Hope you find this information helpful and please see the other posts in this series for additional information on working with media

Reference:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/ch-partitions-x86.html

In this series
Working with media - Unallocated Space
Working with media - Allocated Space
Working with media - Partitioning
Working with media - Sectors
Working with media - Clusters
Working with media - Slack Space
Forensic Imaging and their Formats - The Advanced Forensic Format (AFF)
Forensic Imaging and their Formats - Encase Image (E01)

Forensic Imaging and their Formats - DD (raw)