Chapter Summary

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The following points summarize the key concepts in this chapter:

Floppy Disk Drives

• The first disk drives were floppy disk drives. The technology of floppy disks has changed little in the past decade.
• Floppy disk drives are designated as A or B. The drive letter designation is determined by the location of the drive on the cable.
• Floppy disk drives fail more than any other part of a computer system.

Hard Disk Drives

• The three major steps in installing a hard disk drive are to partition the drive, set the CMOS settings, and format the drive.
• FDISK is used to partition hard disk drives. A computer technician should be familiar with the use of FDISK and partitioning.
• The geometry of a hard disk drive (CHS values) determines its storage capacity.
• There are two type of partitions (primary and extended). MS-DOS must be on the primary partition.
• The active partition is where the operating system is stored. The active partition is usually (but not always) the primary partition.