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3.0 Glossary
| active partition | Primary partition on a hard drive that typically contains and boots the operating system. |
| exclusive access | Lock that is applied to a partition for exclusive writing access, for example while recovering deleted or damaged files or folders. |
| FAT | File Allocation Table. File that contains the records of every other file and directory in a FAT-formatted hard disk drive. The operating system needs this information to access the files. There are FAT32, FAT16 and FAT versions. |
| file signature | Code that identifies the type of file, normally found in the first 20 bytes of the file. To recover data from files, match file signatures against file extensions and then recover data in that file format. |
| MBR | Master Boot Record. All disks start with a boot sector. When you start the computer, the code in the MBR executes before the operating system is started. The location of the MBR is always track (cylinder) 0, side (head) 0, and sector 1. The MBR contains a file system identifier. |
| NTFS | New Technology File System. Developed by Microsoft after the FAT file system, it is the preferred file system for Microsoft Windows operating systems. NTFS has improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization. |
| offset | Starting address location of a partition. |
| primary partition | (boot partition) Partition that contains one file system (DOS, Windows, etc.) or exists for a special use. In DOS or Windows, a standard setup includes a single, active primary partition (usually the C: drive), that contains the operating system, utilities, applications, user data and page/swap file. |