Hard Disk Management What appears in My Computer to be a hard disk drive might or might not correlate to a single physical device

Hard Disk Management

What appears in My Computer to be a hard disk drive might or might not correlate to a single physical device

• A single physical device can be subdivided into partitions, volumes, or logical drives—each appearing in My Computer as a separate drive letter

• Conversely, you can combine storage space from several physical devices so that it appears as a single drive letter

Definition of a Disk

A disk (or hard disk)

• A physical disk drive installed in your computer

• Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2, etc.

• Each physical disk is either a basic disk or a dynamic disk

Basic Disk and Partitions

• A partition is a portion of a physical disk that functions as if it were itself a physically separate disk

• A primary partition is one that can be used for starting Windows (and other operating systems)

A primary partition cannot be further subdivided

• An extended partition can be further divided into one or more logical drives, each of which can be formatted separately and assigned its own drive letter

Basic Disk and Volumes

When a partition or logical drive is formatted and assigned a drive letter it’s called a volume

• A volume appears in My Computer as a local disk

Basic disks contain only basic volumes

• Primary partitions, extended partitions, or logical drives

Dynamic Disk and Volumes

Dynamic disks manage volumes

• Simple, spanned, or striped, with these last two types combining space from multiple dynamic disks

Home Edition and Portable Computers

If you use Windows XP Home Edition, or if you’re running Windows XP Professional on a portable computer, you cannot create or use dynamic disks

Starting Disk Management

At any command prompt, enter diskmgmt.msc, or

Right-click the My Computer icon on the Start menu, choose Manage

• And then select Disk Management on the left side of the Computer Management window

Disk Management Lets You

Check the size, file system, status, and other properties of disks and volumes

Create or delete partitions, logical drives, and volumes

Format volumes

Assign drive letters to hard disk volumes, removable disk drives, and CD-ROM drives

Create mounted drives (also called mount points)

Convert basic disks to dynamic disks

Create spanned volumes and striped volumes

• Which combine storage space from two or more disks into a single drive letter

Extend volumes to increase the size of a drive

• Using free space from the same disk or another disk in the same system

Two New Command-Line Tools

Fsutil

• File system utility

• Allows you to find files by security identifier (SID), change the short name of a file, and perform other esoteric tasks

Diskpart

• Manage disks, partitions, and volumes from a command prompt

These command-line tools are intended primarily to be incorporated into scripts rather than for interactive use

Active Partition

The active partition on a basic disk is the one from which an x86-based computer boots

• The Master Boot Record on the physical disk containing the active partition is used to begin startup

• If you use Windows XP exclusively, or any combination of Windows XP and Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 95/98/Me, or MS-DOS, you do not have to change the active partition

System and Boot Partitions

The system partition

• Contains the bootstrap files that Windows XP uses to start your system and display the boot menu

• Usually the first primary partition on Disk 0, usually drive C

The boot partition

• The partition where the Windows system files are located

• Usually the same as the system partition

Active, System, and Boot Partitions