90 Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010
The operation of converting a simple volume (p. 92) to mirrored is called adding a mirror.
Mirrored volume
A fault-tolerant volume whose data is duplicated on two physical disks (p. 90).
Each of the two parts of a mirrored volume is called a mirror.
All of the data on one disk is copied to another disk to provide data redundancy. If one of the hard
disks fails, the data can still be accessed from the remaining hard disks.
Volumes that can be mirrored include the system volume (p. 93) and a boot volume (p. 83).
A mirrored volume is sometimes called a RAID-1 volume.
P
Partition type
A hexadecimal number that normally identifies the type of a volume or the volume’s file system (p.
87).
For example, a partition type of 07h identifies a volume whose file system is NTFS.
By assigning a particular partition type to a volume, you can mark the volume as a hidden volume (p.
88). For example, changing the partition type of an NTFS volume to 17h makes that volume hidden.
Partitioning
The process of creating a logical structure on a hard disk (p. 88).
Partitioning usually involves creating one or more volumes (p. 93) on the disk.
Acronis Disk Director is an example of a program that can perform partitioning.
Partitioning scheme
The method of organizing volumes on a disk.
There are two partitioning schemes: master boot record (MBR) and GUID partition table (GPT). A disk
whose partitioning scheme is MBR is called an MBR disk; a disk whose partitioning scheme is GPT is
called a GPT disk.
The partitioning scheme determines the number of volumes that the disk can have:
A basic MBR disk can have either four primary volumes (p. 91), or three primary volumes and an
unlimited number of logical volumes (p. 88).
A basic GPT disk can have up to 128 primary volumes.
The partitioning scheme also determines the maximum size of each volume:
The maximum volume size on an MBR disk is 2 terabytes.
The maximum volume size on a GPT disk is 16 exabytes (more than 16 million terabytes).
Partitioning scheme is also known as partitioning style or partition style.
