CHAPTER 25

1. CHAPTER 25 Managing Disks and Drives

2. In this chapter, we’ll look at the disk-management tools provided by Windows 7 and survey some of the scenarios under which you might find these tools of use.

3. The Windows 7 Disk-Management Toolkit • The principal disk-management tool in Windows 7 is the Disk Management console, Diskmgmt.msc.

4. Running Disk Management • At a command prompt, type diskmgmt.msc. • Right-click Computer and choose Manage. The Computer Management console appears. In the console tree (the left pane), select Disk Management.

5. In Control Panel, choose System And Security. Then, under the heading Administrative Tools, choose Create And Format Hard Disk Partitions. Note: • Disk Management requires administrative credentials.

6. YOU CAN USE THIS UTILITY TO PERFORM THE FOLLOWING DISK-RELATED TASKS: • Check the size, file system, status, and other properties of disks and volumes • Create, format, and delete partitions, logical drives, and dynamic volumes • Assign drive letters to hard disk volumes, removable disk drives, and optical drives • Create mounted drives • Convert basic disks to dynamic disks, and vice versa • Create spanned and striped volumes • Extend or shrink partitions

7. FIGURE 25-1 USE THE DISK MANAGEMENT CONSOLE TO GATHER INFORMATION ABOUT AND MANAGE HARD DISKS AND REMOVABLE DISKS.

8. Managing Disks from the Command Prompt • To use Diskpart, start by running Cmd.exe with elevated privileges. You can do that by opening the Start menu and choosing All Programs, Accessories. • On the Accessories submenu, right-click Command Prompt, choose Run As Administrator, and then reply to the User Account Control (UAC) prompt.

9. When you run Diskpart, it opens a console window and dumps you at the DISKPART> prompt. If you type help and press Enter, you see a screen that lists all available commands, like the one shown here:

10. Windows also includes a second command-line tool for file-system and disk management, called Fsutil. This utility allows you to find files by security identifier (SID), change the short name of a file, and perform other tasks.

11. UNDERSTANDING DISK MANAGEMENT TERMINOLOGY • Volume A volume is a disk or subdivision of a disk that is formatted and available for storage. If a volume is assigned a drive letter, it appears as a separate entity in Windows Explorer. A hard disk can have one, several, or many volumes. • Mounted drive A mounted drive is a volume that is mapped to an empty folder on an NTFS-formatted disk. A mounted drive does not get a drive letter and does not appear separately in Windows Explorer. Instead, it behaves as though it were a subfolder on another volume. • Format To format a disk is to prepare it for storage using a particular file system (such as NTFS).

12. File system A file system is a method for organizing folders (directories) and files on a storage medium. • Windows 7 supports the following file systems: FAT (File Allocation Table), NTFS (NT File System), CDFS (Compact Disc File System, also sometimes identified as ISO-9660), and UDF (Universal Disk Format).

13. Basic disk and dynamic disk The two principal types of hard-disk organization in Windows are called basicand dynamic: • A basic disk can be subdivided into as many as four partitions. All volumes on a basic disk must be simple volumes. When you use Disk Management to create new simple volumes, the first three partitions it creates are primary partitions. The fourth is created as an extended partition using all remaining unallocated space on the disk. An extended partition can be organized into as many as 2000 logical disks. In use, a logical disk behaves exactly like a primary partition. • A dynamic disk offers organizational options not available on a basic disk. In addition to simple volumes, dynamic disks can contain spanned or striped volumes. These last two volume types combine space from multiple disks.

14. Simple volume A simple volume is a volume contained entirely within a single physical device. On a basic disk, a simple volume is also known as a partition. • Spanned volume A spanned volume is a volume that combines space from physically separate disks, making the combination appear and function as though it were a single storage medium. • Striped volume A striped volume is a volume in which data is stored in 64-KB strips across physically separate disks to improve performance. • MBR disks MBR (master boot record) is a term describing alternative methods for maintaining the information regarding a disk’s subdivisions. • Active partition, boot partition, and system partition The active partitionis the one from which an x86-based computer starts after you power it up. The first physical hard disk attached to the system (Disk 0) must include an active partition. The boot partitionis the partition where the Windows system files are located. The system partitionis the partition that contains the bootstrap files that Windows uses to start your system and display the boot menu.

15. Setting Up a New Hard Disk • When you run the Windows 7 Setup program on a computer with a single, raw hard disk, Setup presents you with a screen identifying the disk and its size (see Figure 2-2 on page 30).If you want to create a single volume encompassing the entire disk, click Next to proceed. Otherwise click Drive Options (Advanced). On the screen that follows, you can use the Size control to specify how large a volume you want to create for your Windows installation:

17. Specifying Volume Capacity • To begin, right-click anywhere in the rectangle marked Unallocated and choose New Simple Volume from the shortcut menu. The New Simple Volume wizard appears. • Click Next to get past the welcome page. On the Specify Volume Size page, you’ll be shown the maximum and minimum amounts of space you can devote to the new volume:

20. Formatting the New Volume

21. AFTER DISK MANAGEMENT HAS DONE ITS WORK AND THE DISK FORMATTING IS COMPLETE, A DARK BLUE BAR APPEARS OVER THE NEW VOLUME IN THE CONSOLE’S GRAPHICAL PANE: If your disk still has unallocated space (as the disk in this example does), you can add another volume by right-clicking that part of the display and choosing New Simple Volume again.

22. Choosing a File System • Whether you’re setting up a new disk or reformatting an existing one, the process of formatting entails choosing a file system. The choices available to you depend on the type of media you are formatting. With hard disks, the only options made available by Disk Management are NTFS and exFAT ((Extended File Allocation Table ). If you want to format a hard disk in FAT or FAT32, you need to use the command-prompt Format command, with the /FS switch. (Type format /? at the command prompt for details.)

23. If you’re formatting a USB flash drive, on the other hand, FAT32 is a reasonable choice. In the first place, a flash drive is likely to serve at times as a transfer medium, possibly with systems running earlier versions of Windows. Secondly, because NTFS is a journaling file system, reading and writing files on NTFS disks involves more disk input/output than similar operations on FAT32 disks. • Flash drives can perform a finite number of reads and writes before they need to be replaced—hence, they will likely have a longer life expectancy under FAT32 than under NTFS.

24. The Advantages of NTFS • Security On an NTFS volume, you can restrict access to files and folders using permissions. • Reliability Because NTFS is a journaling file system, an NTFS volume can recover from disk errors more readily than a FAT32 volume. • Expandability Using NTFS-formatted volumes, you can expand storage on existing volumes without having to back up, repartition, reformat, and restore. • Efficiency On partitions greater than 8 GB, NTFS volumes manage space more efficiently than FAT32.The maximum partition size for a FAT32 drive created by Windows 7 is 32 GB; by contrast, you can create a single NTFS volume of up to 16 terabytes (16,384 GB) using default settings, and by tweaking cluster sizes you can ratchet the maximum volume size up to 256 terabytes. • Optimized Storage of Small Files Files on the order of a hundred bytes or less can be stored entirely within the Master File Table (MFT) record, rather than requiring a minimum allocation unit outside the MFT. This results in greater storage efficiency for small files.

25. Extending a Volume • Disk Management will be happy to make an NTFS volume larger for you, provided unallocated space is available on the same or another hard disk. To accomplish the expansion, right-click the volume you want to expand, and choose Extend Volume from the shortcut menu.

26. VOLUME EXTENSION IS SUBJECT TO THE FOLLOWING LIMITATIONS: • Only NTFS-formatted volumes can be extended. • A logical drive can be extended only within the extended partition that contains it. • The system and boot partitions can be extended only into contiguous unallocated space. • You cannot extend a striped volume. • If you have increased the size of a logical drive, you can extend the partition on that logical drive to use the newly added space. • Notes: • To complete this procedure, you must be logged on as one of the following: • An administrator • A member of the Administrators group • If your server is connected to a network, network policy settings might prevent you from completing this procedure.

27. Provided space is available, you can shrink an NTFS-formatted volume to make more space available for other volumes. To do this, right-click the volume in either the tabular or graphical pane, and choose Shrink Volume from the shortcut menu. • Disk Management responds by analyzing the disk, and then reports the amount of shrinkage possible in a dialog box like the one shown next.

28. Deleting a volume is easy—and irreversible. All data is lost in the process, so be sure you have backed up or no longer need whatever the volume currently contains. Then right-click the volume and choose Delete Volume. • The volume reverts to unallocated space, and if it happens to have been the last volume on a dynamic disk, the disk itself is converted to basic.

29. Converting a FAT32 Disk to NTFS • To convert a FAT or FAT32 disk to NTFS, use the command-line Convert utility. The essential syntax is • convert d: /fs:ntfs • where d is the drive letter you want to convert. For information about optional parameters, type convert /? at the command prompt.

31. Make a bootable flash disk • A bootable flash disk can be a great way to install Windows 7 on a netbook that lacks an external DVD drive. The trick is to make the flash disk’s partition active, and Disk Management won’t do that for you. Fortunately, Diskpart, the command-line disk management utility, is willing and able. For a clearly written, well-illustrated set of step-by-step instructions, see “Windows 7: Setting Up a USB Bootable Device for Installs,” by Microsoft blogger Jeff Alexander, at w7io.com/2503.

32. Table 25-1 Disk Status Messages

33. Working with Virtual Hard Disks • New in the Windows 7 version of Disk Management is the ability to create virtual hard disks in the .VHD format used by Microsoft Virtual PC and the Hyper-V feature of Microsoft Server 2008 Release 2 (R2).A .VHD file encapsulates all the characteristics of a simple disk volume in a single file. Once created, initialized, and formatted, it appears as a disk drive in Windows Explorer and Disk Management, but you can copy it, back it up, and do anything else with it that you might do with an ordinary file.

34. To create a virtual hard disk, open Disk Management and choose Action, Create VHD. Disk Management responds with the Create And Attach Virtual Hard Disk dialog box:

35. Video How to format a HD • http://www.top-windows-tutorials.com/format-hard-drive.html • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B-d5xoBeqg&feature=related • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyOPfBgGXs&feature=related • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3yskEsecU0&feature=related