Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory – Storage accessing and control – Memory configuring
Reexamination Certificate
1999-04-30
2001-12-11
Kim, Matthew (Department: 2186)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory
Storage accessing and control
Memory configuring
C711S006000, C711S112000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06330653
ABSTRACT:
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. The copyright owner does not hereby waive any of its rights to have this patent document maintained in secrecy, including without limitation its rights pursuant to 37 C.F.R. §1.14.
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to manipulation of actual and simulated computer storage device partitions, and more particularly to uses of simulation to help experiment with, undo, and optimize manipulations of computer disk partitions that contain user data.
TECHNICAL BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Computer hard disks and other computer storage devices hold digital data which represents numbers, names, dates, texts, pictures, sounds, and other information used by businesses, individuals, government agencies, and others. To help organize the data, and for technical reasons, many computers divide the data into drives, partitions, directories, and files. The terms “file” and “directory” are familiar to most computer users, and most people agree on their meaning even though the details of written definitions vary.
However, the term “partition” is unfamiliar to many people, and the term “drive” has different meanings even when the context is limited to computers. As used here, a “partition” is a region on one or more storage devices which is (or can be) formatted to contain one or more files or directories. So-called “IBM-compatible partition” types include extended, logical, and primary, as indicated by bitflags or other values. More generally, each formatted partition is tailored to a particular type of file system, such as the Macintosh file system, SunOS file system, Windows NT File System (“NTFS”), NetWare file system, or one of the MS-DOS/FAT file systems (MACINTOSH is a mark of Apple Computer, Inc.; SUNOS is a mark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.; WINDOWS NT and MS-DOS are marks of Microsoft Corporation; NETWARE is a mark of Novell, Inc.). A file system need not fill the partition which holds it.
“Drive” is sometimes used interchangeably with “partition,” especially in references to logical drive C: or the like on so-called Wintel or IBM-compatible machines. But “drive” may also refer to a single physical storage device such as a magnetic hard disk or a CD-ROM drive. To reduce confusion, “drive” will normally be used here to refer only to storage devices, not to partitions. Thus, it is accurate to note that a partition often resides on a single drive but may also span drives, and a drive may hold one or more partitions.
It is often useful to manipulate partitions by creating them, deleting them, moving them, copying them, changing their size, changing the cluster size used by their file systems, and performing other operations. A number of tools for manipulating partitions are commercially available, including the FDISK program and the PartitionMagic® program (PARTITIONMAGIC is a registered trademark of PowerQuest Corporation). Version 4.0 of the PartitionMagic® program, which became publicly available during September 1998, implements aspects of the present invention. Partition manipulation is also discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,675,769 and 5,706,472 (hereafter the '769 and '472 patents, respectively) and in commonly owned U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,108,759 filed Sep. 17, 1997, U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,831 filed Apr. 11, 1997, U.S. Pat. No. 6,250,300 filed Aug. 15, 1998, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,108,697 filed Oct. 2, 1998, each of whose respective discussions of partition manipulation tools and techniques are incorporated herein.
A Windows NT Disk Administrator program allows the user to delete or create partitions essentially in a virtual fashion, but its support for multiple “virtual” commands is limited. The user is allowed to create a partition, but must “commit changes” before that partition can be formatted. Formatting a partition can only be performed immediately. Other programs that manipulate partitions include version 3.0 of the PartitionMagic program, one or more versions of a Quarterdeck Partition-It program, and one or more versions of two programs from V Communications sold under the names System Commander Deluxe and Partition Commander. Each of these programs generally force the user to make one partition manipulation at a time.
FIG. 1
illustrates familiar approaches to partition manipulation. A user
100
supplies commands to a utility
102
such as FDISK, or an early (version 3.0 or earlier) PartitionMagic program, or another known partition manipulation tool. The user
100
also receives information from the utility
102
, such as partition type(s), location(s), and size(es), and the size and location of free space region(s). This information is typically provided through a Graphical User Interface (“GUI”); one suitable GUI is illustrated in
FIG. 6
of U.S. Pat. No. 5,675,769, and that Figure and its accompanying text are incorporated herein. With continued reference to
FIG. 1
, the utility
102
reads and (with proper semantic and syntactic constraints familiar in the art) writes a partition table
104
stored on a computer storage medium
106
. The storage medium
106
may include one or more hard drives, for instance. The partition table
104
defines the position, size, and type of one or more partitions
108
, which also reside on the storage medium
106
, and may thus define one or more free space regions
110
as well. The utility
102
also reads and writes (again, with proper constraints) file system information and user data which are stored in the partition(s)
108
being manipulated.
Although the PartitionMagic program and other recently developed tools
102
make partition
108
manipulation easier, faster, and safer than it was with FDISK, there is still room for improvement. For instance, it would be helpful to make experimentation easier so that users
100
can more readily try different manipulations and select the ones they deem best. Implicit in this is the need to make it easier to undo a partition
108
manipulation if the user
100
does not like the results. Programs
102
could also provide more help in identifying the partition
108
manipulations that will improve the performance or storage capability of media
106
for a given computer.
One way to encourage experimentation is to make partition
108
moving and copying operations even faster than before. This may be done, for instance, by only moving user data that needs to be moved, as described in claim
1
of the '769 patent identified above. However, this general approach is bounded by limits on the speed with which storage devices
106
can move the user's data. A fundamentally different approach is needed for additional manipulation speed improvements.
Another way to encourage experimentation (at least in theory) is to give users
100
a computer program development environment, to give them computer code for a program
102
implementing the manipulations, and to teach them enough about partitions
108
, partition tables
104
, file systems in partitions, computers, programming, and the code to let them try different approaches. A knowledgeable programmer can “comment out” or jump around sections of program
102
code that would otherwise execute disk
106
I/O or other operations in a given situation and then update the program's data structures using a debugger or other means to imitate the omitted operation's results before the program
102
continues execution. In this way the effect of different operations on the program
102
can be explored without necessarily performing the operations.
However, this approach has several serious drawbacks, not least of which is the demand that users
100
manage a large body of complex technical knowledge. Most users
100
do not have the tech
Janis Damon
Madden Paul E.
Marsh David I.
Marsh Russell J.
Millett Troy
Anderson Matthew
Computer Law
Kim Matthew
PowerQuest Corporation
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