The magic of disks and partitions

Machines have disks attached.

Each disk is visualized as an array of fixed size logical blocks. Historically referred to as sectors.

Disks can be logically partitioned. Where each partition takes a start block and an end block.

Partitions are then mounted for use.

Disks in Windows are numbered, e.g. Disk 0 and 1 and 2, while in Linux they are assigned letters a, b, c based on their interface, e.g. scsi devices are sda, sdb, sdc.

Windows mounts partitions in a drive as drive letters. C: D: E: Linux partitions are numbered and mounted as paths. sda1 is firs disk first partition, sdb3 is second disk third partition.

Each Partition can be formatted with a different file system.

Given a path in Windows you know that c:\home\user2 and c:\home\user3 are both in the C partition. In linux however /home/user2 and /home/user3 could live in different partitions with different file systems, you will have to do lsblk or df to figure out.

Beauty is revealed when the understanding takes place.

I go deeper on this in a dedicated section on my os fundamentals course for those interested.