A computer's firmware is low-level software, with an associated data area, that comes pre-installed in flash memory on the motherboard. The first software to be run when the computer is booted, firmware is generally customised to be motherboard-specific and designed to communicate with other hardware in the system. The two main firmware types used nowadays are BIOS and the more recent UEFI. This article does not cover other firmware interfaces such as libreboot and coreboot.

Originally...

The two main partitioning schemes used on Linux and Windows/DOS are MBR and, more recently, GPT. This article doesn't cover the Mac's original Apple Partition Scheme and additional partition schemes used by various other operating systems.

To understand partitions, it is important to remember that storage devices divide up their space into sectors which are traditionally 512 bytes in length. However, since 2010, most large hard disks (called Advanced Format (AF)) now have physical...