If you're installing an operating system,
you need some type of media that will hold the operating system
software and allow you to start the installation process.
One very common way to do that these days is with a USB drive.
You would first create a bootable USB drive.
There are a number of different utilities
available across different operating
systems that can do this.
And then you would install all of the operating system
installation files to this USB drive.
You would then configure the BIOS
of your computer to be able to boot from this USB drive.
On an older system, you might have an optical drive,
and all of your operating system files
would be contained on a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM.
Of course, in an enterprise where
you have hundreds or thousands of computers
that need to have operating systems installed,
you would probably have a remote method of performing
this installation.
One common way to do this is through PXE.
This PXE stands for pre-boot execution environment,
where you can install this operating
system across the network.
With PXE, you would configure a centralized server
on your network that has all of the operating system
installation files.
You would then boot your computer into this PXE, or PXE,
mode, and it would search across the network to find that server
and begin the installation process.
And of course, you could install all of these operating system
files onto a hard drive or SSD and use those drives
to boot your system.
It's not uncommon for the installation process
of these operating systems to use an updated set of files
that it can download directly from the internet.
This is very common when you perform Linux distributions,
where all of the files are downloaded directly
from servers on the internet.
macOS has a similar functionality
when you use the recovery installation
and it downloads the files directly from Apple.
And if you're installing Windows,
there are Windows updates that can be retrieved directly
from an update server.
You can also have all of this information stored
on a separate external, or hot swappable, drive
that you can plug into any available USB connection.
Some of these external drives support an ISO mode,
where you can install the ISO file onto the device
and then have this system boot up and have it appear as if it
is a single optical drive.
Or of course, you could copy all of the operating system files
onto the drive that's inside of this USB enclosure
and simply connect and use that as an external drive.
If you don't have a way to install the operating
system using these external sources,
you could try installing a new hard drive
or SSD and run the installation process from that drive
internally on your system.
This is obviously a bit more complex
than simply plugging in an external USB drive,
but it does give you access to all
of the necessary installation files.
If you're moving from one operating system version
to an updated version of that OS,
you can commonly perform an in-place upgrade.
This leaves all of your applications in place.
It leaves all of your data files installed on that operating
system and simply upgrades the underlying operating
system on that computer.
Many computers will come installed
with a separate recovery partition on the storage drive
itself.
So instead of trying to find the correct installation media that
may or may not have been shipped with that computer,
you can simply start the installation process
from that recovery partition.
If you don't want to keep any of the applications
or any of the data on that system
and you would like to install a fresh version of the operating
system, you can perform a clean install.
This will effectively delete everything
that's on this partition.
So you want to be sure to have a backup of all
of your personal files.
Some operating systems will include a migration tool
that will perform a backup, allow
you to perform the clean install,
and then restore your files back to that system
once the upgrade is complete.
And if you're working in a corporate environment,
or a large installation with tens or hundreds of computers
that need upgrades, you might want
to perform an image deployment.
You would create a version of the operating system that
could be used by anybody in the organization,
and then you would use that as a version to copy
to everyone's upgraded system.
This means that everybody gets exactly the same configuration.
And if you ever need to replace the system,
you simply override it with that image.
If you're running into problems with an operating system
and you'd like to install the same operating system on top
of it as a way to troubleshoot, you'd
be performing a repair installation.
This doesn't modify any of the user files or applications.
It simply updates, or refreshes, all of the operating system
files for that version.
At home, we might have installation media
that we would plug into our computer,
but in a corporate environment, where all of your systems
are networked, you don't need to carry
around separate installation media.
You simply start the system and point it
to a server that's central on the network.
This is a remote network installation,
and it can be to a local server, or a shared
drive on your system, or you could
install the entire operating system across the internet.
Although most operating system installations
include all of the drivers you would need to get running,
you may run into situations where certain hard drive
controllers or other pieces of hardware
won't work properly during the install.
In those cases, your operating system
may have a way to install drivers during the installation
process so that you would then have access
to the hard drives and other critical hardware components.
If you're starting this operating installation
on a brand new, fresh hard drive,
you'll first need to create an area where you need
to store the operating system.
We refer to this large area as a partition.
It's a way to logically separate different areas of the drive.
You could store different operating systems
in different partitions or simply
use it as a way to organize your data files.
So you might have a computer where you've installed Windows
into one partition, and then you've
created a separate partition just for Linux.
This might allow you to reboot the system
and choose what operating system you'd
like to use during the startup process.
If you're using a Microsoft operating system,
you'll commonly see these partitions
referred to as volumes.
There are minor differences between what Microsoft calls
a volume and what the rest of us call a partition,
but for the purposes of what you'll
be doing in the operating system,
you can consider them to be the same thing.
If you're installing an operating system these days,
you're installing a partition called a GPT partition style.
GPT is short for GUID partition table.
That GUID is also an abbreviation
that stands for globally unique identifier.
When you create this partition, it
assigns it with a unique identifier
that no other partition has in the world, which
is why we call it a globally unique identifier.
If you have a UEFI BIOS, then you
can install this GPT partition style.
On a single physical drive, you can
have up to 128 GPT partitions.
The maximum size is over 9 billion terabytes,
and in Windows, the maximum partition size is currently
set to 256 terabytes.
If you've worked with some of the older MBR type partitions,
then you know there's a difference
between having extended partitions and logical
partitions.
But with the GPT partition style,
all partitions are equal, and you can have up to 128
of those GPT partitions.
That older style of an MBR partition
stands for master boot record.
This is a partition style that you'll find
a much older operating systems.
For example, an MBR partition has
a limitation of only two terabytes
as a maximum partition size.
And given the large size of drives that we have today,
a two-terabyte partition is very limiting.
MBR partition drives have two different kinds of partitions
that you might configure.
One is a primary partition.
Only primary partitions on an MBR drive are bootable.
So if you're installing an operating system that you
need to boot from, it needs to be
located in a primary partition.
You can only have a maximum of four primary partitions
on an MBR partition style drive.
This is obviously very different than the 128
partitions you can have on a GPT partition style.
When you create a primary partition on an MBR drive,
you mark one of those as an active partition.
This way your system knows what operating system should start
automatically during startup.
If you need more than four separate partitions on an MBR
partition style, you would then use an extended partition.
This allows you to create many more partitions on the MBR
partition style, but none of these partitions are bootable.
So you can't install an operating system
into an extended partition and then try to boot
from that operating system.
You can see why having a GPT partition style gives you
so much more flexibility because with GPT, you
can create 128 partitions and then boot from any of those GPT
partitions.
Once you decide whether you'd like to use GPT or MBR,
you can then create that logical partition.
If you're installing a new drive,
you may find that drive has already been partitioned.
You may choose to use this existing partition
or to delete the partitions on the drive
and create the partitions yourself.
Remember that an MBR drive can only support four partitions,
but if you're using a GPT-formatted drive,
you can have up to 128 partitions.
The process of creating or removing a partition
will delete data from your system.
So if there's any data on this computer now,
make sure you have a backup before making
any changes to the partitions.
The partition process occurs during the Window set up
during this dialog box that asks where
do you want to install Windows.
And it will list any partitions that are currently
configured on this drive.
You can choose to add more partitions to this drive,
you can extend the size of existing partitions,
or you can delete what's here and create new partitions.
Once you create the partition, you'll
then need to create the file system that will
be stored on that partition.
And the way that you create a file system
is with the format command.
In Windows, there are different ways to format the drive.
One is through the use of a quick format.
This creates the file table on the drive,
but it doesn't delete or overwrite
any of the existing data that may already
be on that storage device.
This means if somebody accidentally
performs a quick format, there's still
a possibility of recovering the data that's on that drive.
If you're installing Windows 10 or Windows 11,
the quick format process is the default format
that will occur during the installation.
If you want to perform a full format,
then you'll want to use the diskpart utility.
A full format overrides all of the data on the drive
because it's writing zeros to every sector of that storage
device.
If you have any data that's stored on that drive,
it will be overwritten, and everything that was previously
there is unrecoverable.
This is why we often say that if you're
going to make changes to a partition
or run any type of format that you make sure that you have
a backup of all of your data.