Various Kinds of Hardware
There are block devices under Linux for representing all sorts of random access devices: diskettes, hard disks (XT, EIDE, and SCSI), Zip drives, CD-ROM drives, RAM disks, and loopback devices.
Hard Disks
Hard disks are large enough to make it useful to keep different filesystems on different parts of the hard disk. The scheme for dividing these disks is called partitioning. Although it is common for computers running MS-DOS to have only one partition, it is possible to have several different partitions on each disk. The summary of how the disk is partitioned is kept in its partition table.
The Partition Table
A hard disk might be divided like this:
$ fdisk –l Disk /dev/hda: 128 heads, 63 sectors, 970 cylinders Units ...
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