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the files seem readily accessible. Windows XP can’t provide a thumbnail, however, even though it can read the type of image file (JPEG) easily. Further, double-clicking the files opens the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, but you still can’t see the image (Figure 12-24). Better still, you can try to access the files across your network and the encryption does precisely what it’s supposed to do: blocks unwanted access to sensitive data.

Figure 12-23 Encrypted files

Figure 12-24 Windows Picture and Fax Viewer blocked by file encryption

Remember that encryption is separate from the NTFS file security provided by the ACL—to access encrypted files, you need both permission to access the files based on the ACL and the keys used to encrypt the files. We discuss key management in much more detail in Chapter 16, “Securing Windows Resources.”

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NOTE Encryption protects against other users, but only if you log out. It might seem obvious, but I’ve had lots of users get confused by encryption, thinking that the PC knows who’s clicking the keyboard. All protections and security are based on user accounts. If someone logs into your computer with a different account, the encrypted files will be unreadable. We’ll get to user accounts, permissions, and such in later chapters in detail.

Disk Quotas

NTFS supports disk quotas, enabling administrators to set limits on drive space usage for users. To set quotas, you must log in as an Administrator, right-click the hard drive name, and select Properties. In the Drive Properties dialog box, select the Quota tab and make changes. Figure 12-25 shows configured quotas for a hard drive. Although rarely used on single-user systems, setting disk quotas on multi-user systems prevents any individual user from monopolizing your hard disk space.

Figure 12-25 Hard drive quotas in Windows XP

Cluster Sizes

Unlike FAT16 or FAT32, you can adjust the cluster sizes in NTFS, although you’ll probably rarely do so. Table 12-3 shows the default cluster sizes for NTFS.

Table 12-3 NTFS Cluster Sizes

By default, NTFS supports partitions up to ~16 terabytes on a dynamic disk, (though only up to 2 TB on a basic disk). By tweaking the cluster sizes, you can get NTFS to support partitions up to 16 exabytes, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes! That might support any and all upcoming hard drive capacities for the next 100 years or so.

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EXAM TIP NTFS supports partitions up to 16 TB by default.

With so many file systems, how do you know which one to use? In the case of internal hard drives, you should use the most feature-rich system your OS supports. If you have Windows 2000 or greater, use NTFS. External hard drives still often use FAT32 because NTFS features such as the ACL and encryption can make access difficult when you move the drive between systems, but with that exception, NTFS is your best choice on a Windows-based system.

The Partitioning and Formatting Process

Now that you understand the concepts of formatting and partitioning, let’s go through the process of setting up an installed hard drive by using different partitioning and formatting tools. If you have access to a system, try following along with these descriptions. Remember, don’t make any changes to a drive you want to keep, because both partitioning and formatting are destructive processes.

Bootable Disks

Imagine you’ve built a brand new PC. The hard drive has no OS so you need to boot up something to set up that hard drive. Any software that can boot up a system is by definition an operating system. You need a floppy disk, optical disk, or USB thumb drive with a bootable OS installed. Any removable media that has a bootable OS is generically called a boot device or boot disk. Your system boots off of the boot device, which then loads some kind of OS that enables you to partition, format, and install an OS on your new hard drive. Boot devices come from many sources. All Windows OS installation discs are boot devices, as are Linux installation discs. You can make your own bootable devices,