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Things you need to know before installing Linux Alan M Durham WHO/TDR/USP Bioinformatics Course July 2003. File Systems-1. one of the main tasks of the operating systems is managing the storage of information the information in your hard disk isformatted in files
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Things you need to know before installing LinuxAlan M DurhamWHO/TDR/USP Bioinformatics CourseJuly 2003
File Systems-1 • one of the main tasks of the operating systems is managing the storage of information • the information in your hard disk isformatted in files • the hard disks are physically organized in blocks • that means your files are stored in “pieces” • this way it is easy to grow and shrink files, since the space they occupy does not have to be continuous • since you create, modify and remove files, the information gets fragmented • fragmentation means that there are empty spaces between useful information.
File Systems - 2 • each operating system has its own file system • each file system manages disk space differently • since most information of an operating system is inside its files, you need to create a file system to install an OS. • two file sytems cannot share the same disk space • however two file sytems can share the same hard disk, if you divide the disk in continuous “chunks” • these “chunks” are called partitions
Preparing your computer to install Linux • if need to create a partition to install linux • actually you can install linux in many partitions • to not loose any of your windows files, you need to move all blocks out of the space that will be allocatted to the new partition • we call this process defragmentation • defragmentation will move all file blocks to one side of the disk • after defragmentation you have to partition the disk, to do this you will use software provided by the linux developers.
One last question: What is “dual boot”? • the operating system machine code is generally stored in your disk • when you turn your computer on, it goes to a specific part of your hard disk • this part contains the address of the operating system code in your disk • in a dual book system, this “boot sector” will contain the address of a small program that asks you wich system you want to run. • the boot program knows where in the disk the code of each operating sytems is stored. • with such a “boot manager” you can actually have even more than two operating systems • after installing Linux, you need to also install the “boot manager”