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So the things that held the data-containing media were called 'drives' for short. Read on for why.Įtymologically, "drive" originates from motorized hardware that read various media like tapes, floppies and disks. I think calling them drives is a bit sloppy.
#VOLUME HARD DISK DRIVE WINDOWS#
On Windows the word "drive" is more common, though officially MS uses the word volume which is probably the most correct. home partition, boot partition, rootfs partition, etc. (A minor sidenote here is that GPT partitions can be labeled, as can most filesystems)Ĭonventionally partitions are formatted with a single complete volume and are named after their purpose.

I'm not sure what should be used for partitions because they don't have a name MS sometimes refers to mounted volumes as disks or drives, but in their online documentation they are more careful and use "volume". On Windows, one may say drive C: or partition C:Īctually, on Windows the correct wording is "C volume" though I think they can be renamed if you don't like using letters. So we partition drives and format partitions and mount volumes. In modern usage a drive is the set of all sectors belonging to a single piece of (virtual) hardware, from the perspective of the operating system. If you've formatted your partitions without an LVM, then each of your partitions is probably occupied by a single volume. A volume is a set of sectors belonging to the same filesystem, i.e. A partition is just any continuous set of storage sectors listed in some table (e.g. Volume implies formatting and partition does not. A logical volume created by the LVM is a logical storage device which can span multiple physical volumes. A physical volume is a storage device or partition. The term volume in Linux is related to the Logical Volume Manager ( LVM), which can be used to manage mass storage devices. For example, FreeBSD uses /dev/adaX (where X is one or more digits) to refer to PATA disks and /dev/adaXpY (where X and Y are both one or more digits) to refer to partitions on PATA disks. Other Unix-like systems may refer to disks and partitions in other ways. Note that on PCs using MBR partitioning, due to the limit of four primary partitions and the way extended partitions are handled, the partition numbering can slightly differ from the actual partition count. For example, the device node files /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 refer to the first and second partition of the first PATA device. A number after the device letter signifies the number of the partition. Each partition will show up under /dev as a separate device node. If there are more than 26 such devices in the system, devices from the 27th onwards are labeled /dev/sdAa, /dev/sdAb and so on.Ī physical storage device can be divided into multiple logical storage units known as partitions. The prefix sd was originally used for SCSI devices, but is now used for all PATA and SATA devices, including devices on an IDE bus. In Linux prior to kernel version 2.6.20 the prefix hd signified an IDE device, so for instance the device files /dev/hda, /dev/hdb and /dev/hdc corresponded to the first, second and third IDE device respectively. Storage devices are labeled under /dev according to the type of device followed by a letter signifying the order in which they were detected by the system. In Unix-like operating systems, devices are represented by special file system objects called device nodes which are visible under the /dev directory. When you have your data, you can work on the original and see if the disk is physically damaged.The term drive refers to a physical storage device such as a hard disk, solid-state disk, removable USB flash drive etc. There are others, but you need to get to the point of recovery before worrying about that. Test disk and Photo rec are some programs you can start with. Once the image is created, work only with it. Unless you know what you are doing and are absolutely confident that you aren't about to make the disk unreadable, do not change anything at this point. If the disc is readable, then gparted should be able to read it.
#VOLUME HARD DISK DRIVE HOW TO#
That doesn't always mean that the data is gone, it just means that something has happened and it's preventing Windows from understanding how to interpret it. Windows knows that there's something there, but it doesn't know how to read it. Try booting to a live Linux disc, preferably gparted, to see if you can read the device. You can try this one time before making am image. The more you use the actual disk, the less likely it is that you will be able to recover data. Make an image of the disk, and work on that.
