Dispelling the Myths

The Partition Myth

Many people seem to be under the mistaken belief that partitioning a hard disk into several logical drives is a necessity, and people also seem to believe this will protect data in one partition from being affected if another fails. This is where the "Myth" part comes in, because more often than not, if one partition fails the rest are going down with it! As evidenced above, the information about the primary and extended partitions is stored in the Master Boot Sector (C:0 H:0 S:1) , so if something happens to damage the master boot sector, you have just lost your primary partition, so there goes your boot drive, which contains your operating system.

But what about any logical partitions you might have had? Aren't they safe because the information about them is not stored in the Master boot records? The answer unfortunately is "no", because the logical drives partitions records are stored within the extended, and the extended is stored within the Master Boot Sector, so in one shot, all of your partitions have just been swept under the rug. There is the remote possibility that if one partition gets corrupted somehow that the rest will be ok, such as if a single logical partition gets corrupted, that would most likely leave the other logical drives, along with the Extended and Primary alone. Chances are however, that if a partition is going to fail, it's going to be the one that gets worked the hardest, and that my friends, is the Master Boot Sector. There is the slim possibility that the File Table for the primary (or other) partition to fail or become corrupted, in this case, the partition itself might stay perfectly intact, leaving the other partitions and their respective file tables alone as well, but you will definitely be losing most to all of the data on the partition who's file table has failed.

What causes partition failures?

Partitions can fail for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I have seen computers that were booting fine one minute, and then in the next, the partition is just inexplicably gone. I have also seen other computers that have had a primary partition die, and as I said, when the primary dies, all of the extended and logical partitions will go right along with it anyway. So even if you have data stored in separate partitions, you can just kiss it goodbye anyway.

Without a doubt, the two most common reasons for Partition Failure are:

• Disk Fatigue
• Viral Infection

The Master Boot Sector is VERY heavily accessed by the drive. The boot records themselves are backed up by the system, so in the event of the failure, it might be able to replace it with the backup and continue on without you ever knowing it. However, if the surface of the disk becomes physically incapable of storing data correctly, then no amount of backup restorations is going to save you because the MBR area simply cannot store the data correctly. It should be noted that most newer HDD's on the market take the concept of silent data protection a step further with the inclusion of built in diagnostics and repair technology. We'll have more on this later.

Virus infections

Viruses are another biggie. Being that the MBR never moves, it's very easy for it to be attacked by a virus. Some viruses are nice and won't destroy your boot records, but will replace it with it's own code; others will wipe the MBR and the backups, hosing your entire drive. The only way to protect yourself from this kind of attack is to use the BIOS's built in boot Record Virus protection, or use a third party virus scanner program (we recommend Symantec's Norton's Antivirus). This will warn you when anything tries to write to the master boot records, but this can be somewhat of an annoyance since the O/S and some programs might need to write to the boot sector, in which case either the BIOS or software virus scanner will most likely complain that something is displaying "virus-like" behavior falsely.

For informational purposes, virtually NOTHING should EVER need to write to the MBR during normal operations. An obvious exception would be an operating system installer, but the installer should advise you ahead of time about the virus scanner possibly complaining if one is operating at the time of installation. I typically leave this setting off since I don't personally want to be bothered with it. I prefer doing the virus scanning manually( and also have the scanner set to launch and autoscan downloaded files on it's own). For the average user, I recommend turning on the BIOS Boot sector Virus protect, and having a scanner running full time on the system. You will want to remember to kill the scanner when installing programs or playing games however.