CompTia A+ Certification Chapter 9 Implementing Mass Storage

CHKDSK

An older Microsoft error-checking tool used to check faulty blocks on hard drives. It is a command line utility that goes through all the file names on the drives and either erase or save any lost chains for review

BTRFS

Another file system offered by Linux that like ZFS offer powerful copy and disk management features that go beyond the scope of CompTia A+.

Swap Partition

Another special type of partition found only on Linux and UNIX systems. It's only job is to act like RAM when your system needs more RAM than is currently installed.

Allocation Unit

Another term for a block or cluster.

APFS

Apple File System, One of 2 file systems used by macOS. This come default on all modern Macs and existing upgrading systems

Simple spaces

Are just pooled storage like JBOD, that has multiple drives of whatever capacity added together to form a single virtual drive. These spaces provide no resiliency so if a drive fails, the data is lost, these are good only for temporary storage, scratch files, and the like.

Extended Partitions

Are not bootable. A single MBR disk can have up to 4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions and 1 external partition.

Primary Partitions

Designed to support bootable operating systems.

Drive Status

Disk Management allows you to view this for every mass storage device in your system. You should normally see each drive listed as Healthy, meaning it is working properly and nothing is wrong with it

Active

Every primary partition on a single drive has a special setting stored in the partition table called this.

Spanned Volume

Uses unallocated space on multiple drives to create a single volume. This are risky because if one of the spanned drives fails, the entire volume will be lost.

File system

A method used by operating systems to store, retrieve, and organize files.

Disk Cleanup

A powerful tool offered by Windows that aid in the process of removing trash from the hard drive. Including things such as email messages, files in the recycling bin, temp internet files, downloaded program files, and any temporary files. You can find this tool by clicking the start button, and typing "disk cleanup".

FDISK

A 20+ year old command-line program that was used alongside DOS and early Windows to partition drives.

FSCK

A command line utility made by Linux to error-check

Avanquest

A company that Offers a variety of products like Partition Commander.

Live CD

A complete OS on a CD that can be booted automatically.

Volume

A drive structure created with a dynamic disk that Microsoft still uses to this day.

Dynamic Disk

A drive that uses the dynamic storage partitioning scheme.

Partition

A electronic subdivision of a physical drive.

Thin Provisioning

A feature offered by Storage Space that enables you to future-proof your storage needs. This means you can create a space with more capacity than your current physical drives provide. You might have a storage pool large that has 2TB drives and one 3TB drives, laid out as a two way mirror. Rather than limit your new space to a 3TB capacity, you can assign whatever capacity you want like 12TB.

Trim

A feature on modern SDDs that enables the OS to issue commands to clean up and reuse deleted areas so there is no need to defragment any SSD.

Page File

A function on Windows that is similar to Page File, it uses a special file instead of a partition.

Block

A group of pages are converted into these.

PartitionMagic

A leading provider of third-party tools for techs to resize partitions without losing the data the partitions contained.

Hidden Partition

A primary partition that is hidden from the operating system. Only special BIOS tools can access a hidden partition and are often used by PC makers to hide a backup copy of an installed OS that can be used to restore the system if you accidentally trash it.

Format

A process that installs a file system onto the drive that organizes the partitions in a way that the operating system can store files and folders onto the drive.

Disk Defragmenter

A program that comes with Windows 7 that deals with fragmentation.

Protective MBR

A recreation of the master boot record from MBR drives so that the disk utilities know it is a GPT drive and don't mistakenly overwrite any partition data.

Active Partition

A special setting stored in a particular table defines this partition.

Basic Disk

A term Microsoft uses for a hard drive that uses either MBR or GPT schemes.

FAT32

A version of the FAT file system used by both HDDs and SDDs along with some USB flash drives (thumb drives, etc.), using a 32-bit file allocation table. One of the three file systems used by Microsoft.

ACL

Access Control List, a feature NTFS uses to view individual files and folders as objects and provide security for those objects.

AF Sector

Advanced Format, modern drives use these 4096 byte sectors. While older drives only had 512 byte sectors.

Partition Boot Sector

After the MBR locates the appropriate partition, this loads the OS onto the partition. Which then stores information important to its partition.

Mount

After you install the new hard drive, you can do this to the primary partition as a folder within the existing Documents folder on your C: drive

Clusters

All Windows filing systems organize blocks of data into groups called these. The size of each one is varies according to the file system and the size of the partition.

Data Corruption Error

All hard drives occasionally get corrupted data in individual blocks, Power surges, accidental shutdowns, corrupted installation media, viruses, along with hundreds of other problems can cause this corruption.

High Level Formatting

All hard drives, even ones from the factory that are brand new can often contain faulty blocks that cannot store data because of imperfections in their construction. The OS must then locate these bad blocks, and mark them unusable and prevent files from being written to them. This mapping is one of the functions of this. After the format program creates the FAT, it marches through every block in the entire partition, writing and attempting to read from each block sequentially.

Hard Drive Initialization Wizard

All new drives must be initialized before they can be used . When you install a new drive into a Windows system and start Disk Management, it notices the new drive and starts this wizard. If you don't let it run, the drive will be labeled unknown.

Two-way Mirror Storage Layout

Allows you to recover from a single hard drive failure. It does this by mirroring two copies of the data written to the storage space. Must have at least two hard drives configured.

Logical Drives

An extended partition that contains many of these that can obtain drive letters can overcome the MBR disk limits

GParted

An incredibly powerful partition editor that does almost everything the for- pay editors do but it's free!

Sectors

Before a magnetic disk drive leaves the factory, it is magnetically preset with millions if not hundreds of millions of these on very large drives tiny little storage areas.

lost chains

Blocks on a hard drive with no associated filename.

EFS

Encrypting File System, the encryption utility found in NTFS.

ECC

Error Correcting Code, Almost all drives take advantage of this built in program that constantly checks the drive for bad blocks. If it detects a bad block, it marks it and logs into the drives internal error map.

exFAT

Extended File Allocation Table, a newer Microsoft file system that surpasses the capabilities of FAT32 significantly. FAT32 does not work on drives larger than 2 TB and limits file size to 4 GB. So Microsoft developed this replacement to break the 4 GB limit and can now support files up to 16 exabytes (EB) and can theoretically support as high as 64 zettabytes (ZB). Microsoft recommends a partition size of up to 512 TB on today's larger USB drives.

Formatting errors

Failing to format a drive renders the drive unable to hold data. Accessing the drive in Windows results in a drive "is not accessible" error, and from a C:\> prompt you'll get an " invalid media error". Corrupted files can create the invalid media error.

FAT

File Allocation Table, a data structure developed by Microsoft to document and keep track of which clusters store the various parts of a file.

MS-DOS version 2.1

First version of MS-DOS to support hard drives using a data structure and indexing system to keep track of stored data on the hard drive.

Mental Reinstalation

Focus on the fact that all of these errors have a common thread you just installed on the drive. Installation errors don't show up on a system that has been running correctly for three weeks; they show up the moment you attempt to do something with the drive you just installed. If the newly installed drive fails to work, do one of these.

Installation error

Installing drives and getting to the point where it can hold data requires four distinct steps; connectivity, system setup, partitioning, and formatting. If you make a mistake at any point, the drive won't work. The beauty of this is if you make an error you can simply walk back through each step.

ext4

Fourth Extended File System,The primary file system used by Linux distributions by default. Some older distros use either ext2 or ext3 while ex4 supports volumes of up to 1 exabyte (EB) with file sizes up 16 TB and is backward compatible with ext2 and ext3.

Storage Spaces

Functions like a RAID management tool except it goes beyond the typical tool.

GPT

GUID partition table is a newer partition type that is used to create drives larger than 2 TB. And unlike MBR can have an almost limitless number of primary partitions However, Microsoft limits Windows PCs to 128. MBR partitions can be no longer than 2.2 TB while GUID has no such limitations.

GRUB

Grand Unified Boot loader, to control multi boot setups, many people use this free Linux-based boot manager.

HFS+

Hierarchical File System Plus; This is the classic file system used by Mac OSX; can read and write to FAT32 and exFAT; read-only support for NTFS.

Drive not recognized

If you're using hardware RAID and the configuration firmware doesn't recognize one of the drives.

Temporary Files

Many Applications create temporary files that are supposed to be deleted when the application is closed. For one reason or another these temporary files sometimes aren't deleted. The location of these files varies with the version of Windows, but they always reside in a folder called Temp.

MBR

Master Boot Record, the first sector of a MBR drive contains this. Code that informs the system about installing operating systems.

MFT

Master File Table, an enhanced file allocation table offered by NTFS. An NTFS partition keeps a backup copy of the most critical parts of this in the middle of the disk.

Disk Management

Modern Windows uses this graphical partitioning system that can be found in Computer Management in Administrative Tools

Comppression

NTFS allows you to compress individual files and folders to save space on a hard drive. This process makes access time slower because the OS must uncompressed the files every time you use them. But in a space limited environment, sometimes that's what you have to do.

Disk Quotas

NTFS supports these to allow administrators to set these limits on drive space usage for users. To set these you must log on as a admin, right-click the hard drive name and select properties. In the Drive Properties dialog box, select the Quota Tab and make the necessary changes.

NTFS

New Technology File System, this is the current Windows format of choice these days. It came out a long time ago with the first version of Windows NT. Over the years, it had undergone several improvements and uses clusters of blocks and file allocation tables, but in a much more complex and powerful manner compared to FAT32. It offers six major improvements and refinements redundancy, security, compression, encryption, disk quotas, and cluster sizing.

Resiliency Mechanism

Once you create a storage pool, you need to select this option. Which means providing one or more layers or redundancy so you can lose a hard drive or two and not lose data.

GParted

One of the newer Linux partitioning tools that displays GPT partition tabels in Linux

RAID not found

The A+ 220-1001 exam uses this term which doesn't necessarily exist as an error but as a series of errors when an existing RAID array suddenly fails to appear.

Third Party Partition Tools

Organizations that provide these tools for everyday use to techs include Avanquest, Partition Commander Professional, and GParted.

Dying Hard Drive

Physical problems although rare are devastating when they do happen. Symptoms include continuous high pitched squeal. a loud clicking noise, a short pause, followed by another series of clicks. And continuous grinding or rumblings.

Failed

Pray you never see this status, because it means that the disk is corrupted or damaged and you've most likely lost some if not all data!

Partitioning

Process of electronically subdividing a physical drive into one or more units called partitions. These must be formatted to the drive afterward

Striped Volume

RAID 0 volumes. You may take any two unallocated spaces on two separate hard drives and stripe them. But again, if either drive fails all volume is lost.

Mirrored Volume

RAID 1 volumes. You may take any two unallocated spaces on two separate hard drives and mirror them. But again, if either drive fails the other will keep running.

Boot Disk

Removable media, such as a CD or USB flash drive, that contains only the necessary operating system files required to start the computer. Also called Boot Device

Pages

SSDs come from the factory with each NAND chip storing millions of 4096 byte storage areas called these.

Data Structure

Scheme that directs how an OS stores and retrieves data on and off a drive. Used interchangeably with the term file system. (See also file system.)

Disk management utility

Software that helps the operating system store files efficiently on a disk and removes unnecessary files.

End-Of-File Marker

Suppose you have a drive using FAT32. When an application such as Microsoft Word tells the OS to save a file, Windows starts at the beginning of the FAT, looking for the first space marked "open for use"(00000000) and begins to write to that cluster. If the entire file fits within that one cluster then Windows places the code (0000FFFF) as the last cluster into the clusters status area in the FAT.

New Simple Volume Wizard

To create partitions or volumes, right-click the unallocated part of the drive and select the New Simple Volume. Disk Management will then run this wizard and then you will go to straight to the sizing screen.

UBCD

The Ultimate Boot CD, a huge stockpile of useful freeware utilities compiled by frustrated technician Ben Burrows. Who couldn't find a boot disk when he needed one. This includes over 100+ tools all on one single-live CD. More information about Ben Burrows at www.ultimatebootcd.com

Offline

The disk is either corrupted or having communication issues.

Disk Utility

The macOS equivalent of CHKDSK

fdisk

The oldest partitioning program used by Linux

Formatting

The process of making a partition into something that stores files, does two things. First, it creates a filing system then is creates a root directory in the file system to enable the partition to store folders.

Where do you want to install Windows?

The process of partitioning and formatting when installing Windows is straightforward. You'll go through a few installation screens where you select things such as language and get prompted for a product key and acceptance of the license agreement. Eventually you will reach this dialog box.

Parity Spaces

These add another layer of resiliency to the array, similar to how a RAID 5 or RAID 6 provides redundancy. The added resiliency comes with both an upside and downside. The good thing is that they are more space efficient than two way mirroring. In two way mirroring for every 10 GB of data stored, 20 GB of storage must be installed. With parity spaces for every 10 GB stored, only 15 GB of storage needs to be installed. The downside is that the performance overhead to manage can have a significant impact on overall performance.

Partitioning Error

These error fall into two groups: failing to partition at all, and making the wrong size or type of partition. You'll recognize the former type of error the first time you open Windows Explorer/ File Explorer after installing the drive. If you forgot to partition it, the drive won't even show up in Windows Explorer/ File Explorer only in Disk Management. If you made the partition too small then it will become painfully obvious once it starts filling up with files. You can simply fix it by opening up Disk Management and do the partitioning correctly and right click Extend Volume to correct the mistake, keep in mind however that deleting any volume will delete all data on the drive

Mirror spaces

These keep more than one copy of the data, like in a RAID mirror array so you can lose one or more drives and still save data. The number of drives in the array determines which mirror options you have. A two way mirror requires at least two drives: a three way mirror requires 5 or more. These spaces work like RAID 1 and RAID 10 providing excellent redundancy and resiliency and robust performance.

LBA

This is a process where the cylinder, head, and sector locations on a hard disk are converted to 24-bit addresses for data storage and retrieval. And where the controller on the HDD or SDD uses this to present all of these storage chunks as nothing more than a number that starts LBA0 and goes until every sector has a number.

Partition Table

This is contained in the master boot record, it describes the number and size of partitions on the disk. On the MBR these can support up to 4 partitions

File Encryption

This is the black art of making file unreadable to anyone that doesn't have the right key. You can do this to a single file, a folder, or a folder full of files,

Online

This is what you see if a disk is healthy and communicating properly with the CPU.

Fragmentation

This takes place on FAT32 screens all the time when a file fragments or breaks up. Although the system easily negotiate tiny fragments into only two parts, excess fragments can slow down the file system during hard drive read and writes.

RAID 5 Volume

This type of volume is a type of striped volume for RAID 5 arrays that also provides fault tolerance. Data is written to three or more disks; if one disk fails, the remaining drives re-create the data.

Create a new pool and storage space

To get to this screen and run the tool. First, get to the start screen and type storage spaces. Storage Spaces will show up in the search, when it does click on it to run the program. The opening screen should give you this single option.

RAID stops working

When one of the drives in a RAID array fails, several things can happen. This error can also cause a BSoD or a SPoD and can destroy drives and data.

Temporary Internet Files

When you go to a Web Site, Windows keeps copies of the graphics and other items so the page will load more quickly the next time you access it.

Files in the Recycling Bin

Whenever you delete a file, it isn't actually deleted but stored into the Recycling Bin. Just in case you need the file later.

Mount Point

While partitions and volumes can be assigned a drive letter, they can also be mounted as a folder on another drive. This enables you to use your existing folders to store more data than can fit on a single drive or partition/volume.

Storage Pool

With Windows 8 and later versions of the OS. You can group one or more physical drives of any size into a single one of these. These drives can be either HDD or SSD or external storage connected via USB.

Simple Volume

Works similarly to primary partitions. If you have a hard drive and you want to make half of it E: and the other half F: for example, you create 2 volumes on a dynamic disk.

Dynamic Disks

You create these from basic disks in Disk Management. Once you convert a drive from a basic disk to this, primary and extended partitions no longer exist; these are divided into volumes instead of partitions.

Foreign Drive

You see this when you move a dynamic disk from one computer to another.

Formatting (drive status)

You see this when you're formatting a drive

Defrag

You should do this about once a month to prevent over fragmentation from slowing the CPU.

Downloaded Program Files

Your system always keeps a copy of any applets it download. You can see these in the Internet Options by clicking the settings button under the browsing history label.

ZFS

Zettabyte File System, used by many enterprise-level (big data center) Linux distributions.

disk initialization

_____includes identifiers that say where the drive belongs & what it does

Dynamic Storage Partitioning

aka Dynamic Disks; creates partitions, but they are called volumes; not limited to 4 per disk; can do RAID; all Windows Pro and above support this