Introduction

With the advent of operating system DOS 2.0 in 1983 the hard drives support was implemented for the fist time, including Disk partitioning and logical volumes support.

Several partitions on one hard disk have following advantages:

–it allowed on a single physical hard disk to store information in different file systems or in the same file system, but with different size of clusters;

–an opportunity to separate information for security purposes from the user's files operating system (OS);

–a possibility to install multiple operating systems on one hard disk;

–formatting and defragmentation of each section became possible without appealing the others.

Using standard tools for the manipulation of the OS partition on the hard drive is not always possible and convenient for several reasons. Therefore, currently a group of specialized software packages, so-called HDD-managers, is applied.

The research deals with the development of possible alternative hard disk manager in Windows.

Relevance

The most popular hard disk partition managers are distributed on a commercial (paid) basis. They include Acronis Disk Director Suite, Norton Partition Magic, Paragon Partition Manager. There are several free and opensourse programs performing sectioning operations which are successfully competing with commercial (Parted Magic, Partition Logic, Cute Partition Manager, etc.). But sometimes they are inferior to the leaders of functionality, and because of the lack Windows-versions user has to boot from the CD / floppy / flash drive, and only then can start working with the HDD. That’s what makes the development of a software product of that direction urgent.

Moreover, the rapid increase in the size of hard disks, the problem of support GUID Partition Table (GPT) becomes urgent, because the maximum amount supported by master boot record (MBR) is 2 terabytes. GPT supported up to 18 exabyte (18 * 2⁶⁰ bytes).

The research purposes

The present Master research has for an object the development of the alternative hard disks partition manager for OS Windows 2000/XP, which would have the necessary functions to remove, copying, moving, formatting partitions with different file systems.

Several studies to verify the correctness and efficiency of implemented algorithms will be carried out in this research. A number of requirements is pulled out to the algorithms concerning speed and heavy hardware. Therefore, at this stage, an analysis of existing disk managers and experiments on them was done.

The functionality of developed program

Manager field of use – working under Windows 2000/XP with hard disk sectioning containing file system FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Linux Ext3 and Linux Swap.

Software product under development would provide a large opportunity to manage a hard drive, including the following:

– creation and formatting partitions with file systems FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Linux Ext3 and Linux Swap;

– removing any partition;

– copying partitions;

- moving partitions;

– label editing, assigning partition active status;

–estimating of section’s free space changes when changing the size of the cluster with the possibility of carrying it out;

- resizing, copying, moving partitions with the information kept on them;

- conversions from FAT16 to FAT32 and vice versa;

- GPT support.

Conclusions

Advantages of the developed manager – free and open code would significantly expand further set of functions and number of file systems supported.

Results of the research have some practical applications like hard disks manager in Windows operating system with Linux file systems support as an alternative to the existing. The program, integrally and in its individual modules can be applied during training courses.

To date, the ultimate goal of the project has been not reached yet. Deadline of the project – in December 2008.