PARTITION

A partition is a part, piece or division of a larger whole. A piece of pie
is one partition of the whole pie.

A hard disk can be divided up into as many as 4 separate partitions by the 
FDISK or PART command. Each partition is treated by DOS as if it were a 
separate disk with a separate name. One partition on a hard disk is always 
called the "active" partition when booting the computer. It is called the 
default partition, and the choice of which partition is "active" can be 
changed by the FDISK or PART command.

The smallest partition that can be defined is 32,000 characters. On versions
of DOS prior to 4.0, the largest partition that can be defined by the PART or
FDISK command is 32 million characters. Separately purchased programs can
support larger partitions. On DOS 4.0 and later, the largest partition that
can be defined is about 2 billion characters. 
