Glossary

In KDE Partition Manager commands are what jobs are made up of. These are very low level steps being taken, often executed by an external tool, and only visible in the detailed progress report.

The user normally does not have to bother with commands at all.

See Also Operation, Job.

A unit used to divide up a device. Some operating systems and many disk tools require partitions to begin and end on a cylinder. KDE Partition Manager therefore automatically snaps partitions to cylinder boundaries when changing their start or end.

See Also Head, Sector.

The number of sectors per cylinder on a device. Calculated as the number of heads multiplied by the number of sectors per track.

A physical disk device. Physical disk devices are divided into logical sections called partitions with the use of partition tables.

Another name for a partition table stemming from the SUN/BSD world.

See Also Partition Table.

A partition that contains other partitions. Extended partitions can only be primary partitions themselves. Whether extended partitions are available or not depends on the partition table type used. MS-DOS partition tables allow one extended partition per device.

See Also Primary Partition, Logical Partition.

A file system defines how the storage of data (files with their metadata, folders and their metadata, free space) is organized within a partition. There are various different types of file systems, some coming originally from the Unix/Linux world, some not. Examples for commonly used file systems on Unix/Linux are Btrfs, ext4 and XFS.

A title of a file system. Some file systems (among them Btrfs, ext2/3/4, FAT16/32 and NTFS) support setting a label for the file system so it can be identified in tools like KDE Partition Manager or other applications.

A modern partition table format supported by most modern computers and operating systems. It supports more than 4 primary partitions unlike older MS-DOS partition table.

A unit used to divide up a device.

See Also Cylinder, Sector.

In KDE Partition Manager a number of jobs is what operations are made up of. You normally do not have to bother with jobs at all; it only becomes apparent when applying the list of pending operations: KDE Partition Manager will then show a progress dialog that is made up of all operations and their jobs and show which operation and which job is currently being executed.

See Also Operation, Command.

Either a disk label or a file system label.

See Also Disk Label, File System Label.

A partition inside an extended partition.

See Also Primary Partition, Extended Partition.

Linux Unified Key Setup is the standard encryption format for Linux.

LVM is a system for managing logical partitions that is more flexible than normal partitions. It consists of three main components:

KDE Partition Manager divides the work it does up in operations, jobs and commands.

Operations are the most visible of the three. If you pick an action in the graphical user interface, this will likely result in a new operation being added to the list of pending operations. The idea behind that is: You will most probably want to set up quite a number of steps to transform the current state of your disk devices to the state you have in mind. Some of these steps may take quite a long time to execute (like copying a large file system or resizing a file system that is nearly full). To save you from having to sit in front of your computer for a long time waiting for one step to finish and then starting the next one, operations allow you to exactly specify how the computer's devices should look like once everything is finished, then let KDE Partition Manager apply the operations and come back when it has executed all of them.

Operations are kept in a list of pending operations. As long as an operation has not been applied it can still be taken back easily and nothing will have been modified.

See Also Job, Command.

A section of a hard disk device that can hold a file system or other partitions. Without at least one valid partition, a disk can not be used.

See Also Device, Partition Table, Primary Partition, Extended Partition, Logical Partition.

A marker for a partition. The availability of these flags depends on the type of partition table used.

A small section at the beginning of a device used to store information about the layout of the device's partitions. There are different types of partition tables, each with their own limitations.

Sometimes also referred to as “disk label”.

A partition directly inside a partition table, as opposed to logical partitions, which are in extended partitions.

Partition tables usually impose restrictions on the maximum number of primary partitions that can be created on a device. For MS-DOS type partition tables, for example, this maximum number is four.

See Also Extended Partition, Logical Partition.

A unit used to divide up a device. Partitions must always begin and end on a sector.

See Also Head, Cylinder.

The number of bytes per sector on a device. The sector size of most devices in use today is 512 bytes.