Whats a partition?

[mapes]

As most folks have said your laptop is partitioned that way prolly due to the manufacturer wanting some type of recovery drive. As to answer your question a partition is a logical grouping of sequential space on a drive. It can be used to create basically a drive letter such as C: D: or it can be used for system level stuff. For example in Unix the system uses a partition for swap space which is equivalent to a windows paging file. The difference is the OS has full control over that partition.