What are partitions and volumes?

A partition is an area of a hard disk that can be formatted and assigned a drive letter. On a basic disk (the most common type of disk) a volume is a formatted primary partition or logical drive. (The terms volume and partition are often used interchangeably.) Your system partition is typically labeled with the letter C. Letters A and B are reserved for removable drives or floppy disk drives. Some computers have hard disks that are partitioned as a single partition, so your whole hard disk is represented by the letter C. Other computers might have an additional partition that contains recovery tools, in case the information on your C partition becomes damaged or unusable