One of the first things that you should probably become familiar with as a computer user of any OS is the managing of your system's partitions. No doubt that fancy new box you just shelled out big blood and soul for has a giant partition; or one giant one and perhaps a hidden (or revealed) "restore" partition. Some vendors make a partition with all the necessary system restore files on it for you to use after you've FUBAR'd your box.

We talk about backing up your existing partition (imaging), re-partitioning your hard drive, creating partitions, deleting them, etc., etc., etc.

We'll talk about resizing them as well and I'll even spell out for you how simple it is to keep your Windows install and get your feet wet with Linux by making a partition (or 34) to install it on. This is refered to as "dual-booting" .

As I'll say in the tutorials and articles: Back your data up. Again, prudent folk employ backups and they stick to a regieme. Don't blow all your data because you were hasty.

You know you have hard drives. You may have even heard about partitions, well here's a pretty simple analogy: Hard drives are your house and the partitions are the rooms inside. You can have specialized partitions, like your super decadent bathroom, or general ones like a bedroom.

Any way that you slice it, it's a good idea to be familiar with managing your partitions. There may come a day when you have to image a partition or restore lost data (pretty hard to wipe data from a hard drive these days) or resize, etc., etc., etc.