Penguin
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A 'slice' of your HardDisk. (In fact, in some OS's like BSD, partitions are called slices.) Once you have a partition it appears to the OperatingSystem as a different hard disk you have to put a FileSystem on top of it.

In older terms, think of it like breaking your hard disk into a C: and a D: drive. Then, you can do anything you want on your D: drive, even format it, and still have all the information on your C: drive. (Thankfully Linux doesn't use DriveLetters and even Windows is moving away from it.)

If you have one hard disk and want a DualBooting system, you will need to arrange your hard disk into two or more partitions.

In Linux, partitions are managed with fdisk(8) or one of the newer utils like cfdisk(8).