Merging computer partitions

Details Merging computer partitions Merging computer partitions

1999-09-11

2001-02-06

Yoo, Do Hyun (Department: 2187)

Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory

Storage accessing and control

Memory configuring

C713S100000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06185666

ABSTRACT:

FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to manipulation of computer disk partitions without destroying user data, and more particularly to tools and techniques for merging computer disk partitions that contain user data organized by FAT, NTFS, or similar file systems.
TECHNICAL BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Computers utilize a wide variety of disks as storage media for user data. Disk technologies currently provide optical disks, magnetic disks, hard disks, floppy disks, and removable disks, and new disk technologies are being actively researched and developed. Indeed, some disks used by computers in the future may be cubical or some other shape rather than flat and circular. Investigation into “disks” in the form of non-volatile semiconductor storage devices such as flash memory is also ongoing.
FIG. 1
illustrates a disk
100
attached to a disk drive
102
. The disk
100
illustrates physical characteristics of both floppies and hard disks; cubical disks or other disks may appear in different configurations than the one shown here. The disk
100
contains a number of concentric data cylinders such as the cylinder
104
. The cylinder
104
contains several data sectors, including sectors
106
and
108
. The sectors
106
and
108
are located on an upper side
110
of the disk
100
; additional sectors may be located on a lower side
112
of the disk
100
. The sides
110
,
112
of the disk
100
define a platter
114
. A hard disk may contain several platters. The upper side
110
of the disk
100
is accessed by a head
116
mounted on an arm
118
secured to the drive
102
. Optical or cubical disks may be accessed by other means, such as photoemitters or photoreceptors.
A given sector on the disk
100
may be identified by specifying a head, a cylinder, and a sector within the cylinder. A triplet specifying the head number, cylinder number, and sector number in this manner is known as a “physical sector address.” Alternatively, a given sector may be identified by a logical sector address, which is a single number rather than a triplet of numbers.
An operating system manages access, not only to the disk
100
, but to other computer resources as well. Resources typically managed by the operating system include one or more disks and disk drives, memory (RAM and/or ROM), microprocessors, and I/O devices such as a keyboard, mouse, screen, printer, tape drive, modem, serial port, parallel port, or network port.
Many disks mold the available space into one or more partitions by using a partition table located on the disk. A wide variety of partitions are used, and more partition types will no doubt be defined over time. A partial list of current partitions and their associated file systems is given in U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,831 and incorporated here by reference. The list includes a variety of 12-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit FAT file systems and numerous other file systems. Tools and techniques for manipulating FAT partitions and certain other partitions are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,675,769, 5,706,472 and 5,930,831 assigned to PowerQuest Corporation, incorporated herein by this reference.
The NT File System (“NTFS”) system provide useful features not available under many existing FAT file systems. Discussions of NTFS are provided in “Inside the Windows NT File System”, by Helen Custer, ISBN 1-55615-660-X, and “Inside Windows NT” (Second Edition), by David A. Solomon, ISBN 1-57231-677-2, as well as in marketing and technical materials available in hard copy and on the Internet from Microsoft Corporation and other sources.
Some computer systems, such as many using NetWare FS or NTFS, mold disk storage into “segmented partitions” or “segmented volumes” with an approach somewhat different from that noted above. Segmented partitions are most often used in connection with file systems such as the Novell NetWare file system (NetWare is a mark of Novell), but may also be used with DOS (i.e., FAT) file systems and NTFS. The NetWare file system and related partition structures are discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,672; that discussion is incorporated herein. The NetWare file system is also discussed in marketing and technical materials available in hard copy and on the Internet from Novell and other sources.
On segmented systems, a “volume” is an instance of a file system. Hard drives may be divided into partitions, and volumes may be divided into “segments”. A “segmented volume” is a volume which does or can contain segments, i.e., a segmentable volume. A “segmented partition” is a partition which does or can contain segments, i.e., a segmentable partition. For instance, a type 06 partition is not a segmented partition. A given partition may hold zero or more segments from zero or more volumes which are instances of one or more file systems; the cases of primary interest here are those in which one or more segments from one or more volumes are present.
The file system structures on disk do not necessarily reflect the presence of segments. Some NetWare FS structures can define the location and/or extent of segments, for example, but structures manipulated by NTFS routines do not ordinarily define segment extent or location. Segments may be created with conventional tools in order to improve response times or to provide fault tolerance. For example, in a Microsoft Windows NT environment, the Disk Administrator tool can be used to set up an NTFS volume that spans multiple disk drives. A NetWare partition is a section of a disk which is allocated to NetWare by a partition table. NetWare partitions may not span disks. Segmented partitions in other environments may be subject to the same or similar requirements. Although specific definitions of “disk” and “drive” are given herein, those of skill in the art will recognize that these terms are sometimes used interchangeably when the distinction between the media and the controller/drive mechanism is not important.
One partition table composition, denoted herein as the “IBM-compatible” partition table, which includes both the FAT file system and NTFS, is found on the disks used in many IBM® personal computers and IBM-compatible computers (IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines). Although IBM is not the only present source of personal computers, server computers, and computer operating systems and/or file system software, the term “IBM-compatible” is widely used in the industry to distinguish certain computer systems from other computer systems such as Macintosh computer systems produced by Apple (Macintosh is a mark of Apple Computer). IBM-compatible partition tables may be used on a wide variety of disks, with a variety of partition and file system types, in a variety of ways. They are generally used on 80×86 or Pentium-based architectures (Pentium is a mark of Intel), but may be used on computers with other CPU types.
As shown in
FIG. 2
, an IBM-compatible partition table
200
includes an Initial Program Loader (“IPL”) identifier
202
, four primary partition identifiers
204
, and a boot identifier
206
. As shown in
FIG. 3
, each partition identifier
204
includes a boot indicator
300
to indicate whether the partition in question is bootable. At most one of the partitions in the set of partitions defined by the partition table
200
is bootable at any given time. Some IBM-compatible computer systems allow “logical partitions” as well as primary partitions. All logical partitions are contained within one primary partition; a primary partition which contains logical partitions is known as an “extended partition.”
Each partition identifier
204
also includes a starting address
302
which is the physical sector address of the first sector in the partition in question, and an ending address
304
which is the physical sector address of the last of the last sector in the partition. The start of a partition is sometimes referred to as the “left edge” or “beginning” and the end of the partition is sometimes referred to as the “right edge” or “ending” of the partition. A boot sector address
308
typi

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