A+ Operating
Systems Technologies (220-232) ExamCram
A+ Certification, awarded by CompTIA®
organization is the most widely recognized certification in the
area of PC hardware and software technologies. To attain A+
certification, one need to pass 2 exams, namely, A+ Core
Hardware Technologies, and A+ Operating Systems Technologies.
These exams basically test the skills in assembling a computer,
troubleshooting, and the ability to work with various operating
systems. Linux is not included in the A+ Certification Operating
Systems exam, as it has an exam of its own (Linux+
Certification), offered by CompTIA. The exam cram offers several
final preparation points for candidates intending to appear for
the A+ test. Latest objectives are available from Comptia.com
website.
1. IDE hard disks:
- An IDE hard disk can have one Primary partition and one
Extended partition. An Extended partition can be divided into
one or more logical partitions. After partitioning the hard
disk, each partition needs to be formatted.
- The File System Boot Sector is the first physical sector on
any logical volume.
- The first physical sector on any bootable hard disk contains
Master Boot Record, MBR.
- The command FDISK will destroy all the data on a partition or
drive on to which it is run.
- The primary partition can be made bootable, by marking
partition as active.
2. FAT:
- Windows 98 and Windows 95 OEM Release 2 support FAT32. Note
that Windows NT does not support FAT32. NT supports only FAT16
and NTFS. Windows 2000 supports FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS.
- DOS standard FAT16 support drives up to 2 GB. FAT32 supports
drives up to 2TB (Terabytes).
3. PC Utilities: The following DOS utilities are useful in
proper maintenance of PCs.
A. SCANDISK: ScanDisk is a utility program that was added to DOS
Version 6.0. SCANDISK is a better compared to CHKDSK. SCANDISK
can fix errors on data storage devices such as hard disks,
floppy disks, RAM drives etc, and DoubleSpace compressed drives.
It analyzes and repairs damage to the following:
1. Physical clusters
2. File allocation table (FAT)
3. Lost clusters
4. Cross-linked files
5. Directory tree
6. MS-DOS Boot sector
7. DBLSPACE volume header, file structure, compression
structure.
B. CHKDSK (Check Disk): CHKDSK command, one of DOS commands,
examines your hard drive for error conditions and reports the
total size of the disk, how many files are stored there, and the
space remaining. CHKDSK also reports the total amount of
conventional memory in your system and the amount of
conventional memory available. Note that CHKDSK can't report
extended memory.
C. DFRAG: The DFRAG.EXE is included with DOS6.0 and later.
DEFRAG utility arranges the clusters of data on the hard drive
to achieve better performance by placing all of the clusters for
a given file together in a contiguous order. DEFRAG does not do
any repair on your disk, and errors, if any will remain on the
disk.
D. BACKUP: DOS has a backup utility since version 2.0.
4. .COM, .EXE, .BAT files are executable files.
5. DOS Boot up:
- IMPORTANT DOS FILES USED DURING BOOT UP ARE:
A. AUTOEXEC.BAT
- It does: Modifies the PC environment (PATH, SET, and other
commands)
- Default Attributes: Nil
- Is it required for OS Start up: NO
B. CONFIG.SYS
1. It does: Loads low level device drivers and does performance
tuning
2. Default Attributes: Nil
3. Is it required for OS Start up: NO
C. IO.SYS
1. It does: Loads basics Input/ Output routines for the
processor
2. Default Attributes: Hidden / System/ Read Only
3. Is it required for OS Start up: YES
D. MSDOS.SYS
1. It does: Defines System File locations
2. Default Attributes: Hidden / System/ Read Only
3. Is it required for OS Start up: YES
E. COMMAND.COM
1. It does: The file contains internal command set and error
messages
2. Default Attributes: Nil
3. Is it required for OS Start up: YES
4. Responsible for displaying the command prompt in a DOS based
computer.
F. HIMEM.SYS
1. HIMEM.SYS must be loaded before EMM386.EXE
2. HIMEM.SYS is used to address the extended memory
G. EMM386.EXE
1. EMM386.EXE allows access to Upper Memory Area. Please note
that the conventional memory of 1 MB is divided into 1. Lower
Memory Area 640 KB, and 2. Upper Memory Area 384KB
(1024KB-640KB).
H. ANSI.SYS
- The files AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, ANSI.SYS are not required
for OS start-up. However, the files IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS,
COMMAND.COM are required for OS start-up.
- To bypass the CONFIG.SYS, and AUTOEXEC.BAT files during boot
process of DOS, you need to press F5. F8 allows you to
selectively bypass commands in AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS.
6. DOS allows you to set the following attributes using ATTRB
command:
1. System
2. Hidden
3. Read-only
4. Archive
'+' sets and attribute
'-' clears an attribute
Examples:
- The command ATTRIB +H myfile.txt will make the file myfile.txt
hidden. The other attributes that can be set using ATTRIB
command are System, Read Only, and Archive.
- The command ATTRIB C:\private.txt +h +r will mark the file
private.txt as both hidden and read only.
7. DOS, Windows3.1 Windows 95/ 98 operating systems have the
following characteristics:
1. Each can have only one primary partition per hard disk
2. The primary partition is automatically assigned a drive
letter
3. Each hard disk can have only one Extended partition
4. You can create one or more logical drives in the Extended
partition.
5. The drive letters are assigned manually to logical drives.
8. The standard DOS partition cluster sizes are as given below:
16MB-127MB: 2KB cluster size
128MB-255MB: 4KB cluster size
256MB-511MB: 8KB cluster size
512MB-1023MB: 16KB cluster size
1024MB-2048MB: 32KB cluster size
Note that due to DOS limitation, the FAT on each hard drive
partition can have 64K (65535) individual addresses. Therefore,
it is clear, depending on the size of partition, this number
dictates the size of each cluster. We arrive at 32KB cluster
size by dividing 2048(MB) with 64(KB).
9. The Windows 95/98 system files include the following:
A. IO.SYS
B. MSDOS.SYS
C. WIN.INI
D. COMMAND.COM
E. SYSTEM.INI
F. SYSTEM.DAT
G. USER.DAT
- MSDOS.SYS, WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI are text files.
- SYSTEM.DAT, USER.DAT files are part of windows Registry and
can be edited using REGEDIT or REGDT32 utility. Registry files
can't be read with standard text editors.
- Further, USER.DAT file corresponds to HKEY_LOCAL_USER and
SYSTEM.DAT corresponds to HKEY_LOCAL)MACHINE.
10. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is the hive where the information
specific to the machine will be stored. The information may
include, network settings, hardware drivers etc.
HKEY_LOCAL_USER hive stores data specific to user configuration,
such as desktop color schemes, screen savers, wall paper, and
user specific application settings. |