B
basic disk
A physical disk that can be accessed by MS-DOS and all Windows-based operating systems. Basic disks can contain up to four primary partitions, or three primary partitions and an extended partition with multiple logical drives. If you want to create partitions that span multiple disks, you must first convert the basic disk to a dynamic disk by using Disk Management or the Diskpart.exe command-line tool.See also dynamic disk.
basic volume
A primary partition or logical drive that resides on a basic disk.See also basic disk.
batch program
An ASCII (unformatted text) file that contains one or more operating system commands. A batch program's file name has a .cmd or .bat extension. When you type the file name at the command prompt, or when the batch program is run from another program, its commands are processed sequentially. Also called batch files.
boot partition
The partition that contains the Windows operating system and its support files. The boot partition can be, but does not have to be, the same as the system partition.
boot volume
The volume that contains the Windows operating system and its support files. The boot volume can be, but does not have to be, the same as the system volume.See also system volume.
bottleneck
A condition, usually involving a hardware resource, that causes a computer to perform poorly.