One of the most confusing and intimidating parts of installing Linux for dual-booting with Windows is the disk partitioning required.

Corresponding to this, Linux reserves the first four device names on a disk drive to match these four partitions - regardless of how many partitions you actually create.

You can format an external hard drive in Ubuntu using the Gnome Partition Editor. It provides a graphical interface to simplify formatting and resizing hard drive partitions, even on external drives.

Terms like hard disk, drive, partition, and image are often confusing. Knowing the difference saves time and avoids errors ...

A partition separates a section of a physical disk into another virtual drive. When you split a hard drive into two partitions, you're creating a separate disk that your operating system (like ...

How to use DiskPart to Format a Disk Partition If you face a problem in formatting the system hard disk partition, external hard drive, or the USB Flash drive, then using DiskPart, you can easily ...

With this, dd can copy a file to another file, or a partition to another partition, or file to partition (and vice versa). This makes dd quite versatile, and perfect for cloning partitions and drives.

Mum decided to format the hard drive before she gave it to me, so it doesn't boot anything. I thought I may as well slap Linux on it and see how it does before I decide what to do with it.