CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [190]
Disk Management works only within Windows, so you can’t use Disk Management from a boot device. If you install Windows from an installation disc, in other words, you must use the special partitioning/formatting software built into the installation program you just saw in action.
One of the most interesting parts of Disk Management is disk initialization. Every hard drive in a Windows system has special information placed onto the drive. This initialization information includes identifiers that say “this drive belongs in this system” and other information that defines what this hard drive does in the system. If the hard drive is part of a RAID array, its RAID information is stored in the initialization. If it’s part of a spanned volume, this is also stored there. All new drives must be initialized before you can use them. When you install an extra hard drive into a Windows system and start Disk Management, it notices the new drive and starts the Hard Drive Initialization Wizard. If you don’t let the wizard run, the drive will be listed as unknown (Figure 12-42).
Figure 12-40 The first 66-GB partition
To initialize a disk, right-click the disk icon and select Initialize. Once a disk is initialized, you can see the status of the drive—a handy tool for troubleshooting.
Disk Management enables you to view the status of every drive in your system. Hopefully, you’ll mostly see the drive listed as Healthy, meaning that nothing is happening to it and things are going along swimmingly. You’re also already familiar with the Unallocated and Active status, but here are a few more to be familiar with for the test:
Foreign drive You see this when you move a dynamic disk into another computer.
Formatting As you might have guessed, you see this when you’re formatting a drive.
Failed Pray you never see this status, because it means that the disk is damaged or corrupt and you’ve probably lost some data.
Online This is what you see if a disk is healthy and communicating properly with the computer.
Offline The disk is either corrupted or having communication problems.
Figure 12-41 Disk Management
Figure 12-42 Unknown drive in Disk Management
A newly installed drive is always set as a basic disk. There’s nothing wrong with using basic disks, other than that you miss out on some handy features. To create partitions, right-click the unallocated part of the drive and select New Partition. Disk Management runs the New Partition Wizard, with which you can select a primary or extended partition (Figure 12-43). Afterward, you see a screen where you specify the size partition you prefer (Figure 12-44).
Figure 12-43 The New Partition Wizard
Figure 12-44 Specifying the partition size
If you choose to make a primary partition, the wizard asks if you want to assign a drive letter to the partition, mount it as a folder to an existing partition, or do neither (Figure 12-45). (If you choose to make an extended partition, you just get a confirmation screen and you are returned to Disk Management.) In almost all cases, you’ll want to give primary partitions a drive letter.
Figure 12-45 Assigning a drive letter to a primary partition
The last screen of the New Partition Wizard asks for the type of format you want to use for this partition (Figure 12-46). If your partition is 4 GB or less, you may format it as FAT, FAT32, or NTFS. If your partition is greater than 4 GB but less than 32 GB, you can make the drive FAT32 or NTFS. Windows requires NTFS on any partition greater than 32 GB. Although FAT32 supports partitions up to 2 TB, Microsoft wants you to use NTFS on larger partitions and creates this limit. In today’s world of big hard drives, there’s no good reason to use anything other than NTFS.
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NOTE Windows 2000/XP and Windows Vista/7 read and write to FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB; they just don’t allow Disk Management to make them. If you ever stumble across a drive from