CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [191]
You have a few more tasks to complete at this screen. You can add a volume label if you want. You can also choose the size of your clusters (Allocation unit size). There’s no reason to change the default cluster size, so leave that alone—but you can sure speed up the format if you select the Perform a quick format checkbox. This will format your drive without checking every cluster. It’s fast and a bit risky, but new hard drives almost always come from the factory in perfect shape—so you must decide whether to use it or not.
Figure 12-46 Choosing a file system type
Last, if you chose NTFS, you may enable file and folder compression. If you select this option, you’ll be able to right-click any file or folder on this partition and compress it. To compress a file or folder, choose the one you want to compress, right-click, and select Properties. Then click the Advanced button to turn compression on or off (Figure 12-47). Compression is handy for opening up space on a hard drive that’s filling up, but it also slows down disk access, so use it only when you need it.
Figure 12-47 Turning on compression
After the drive finishes formatting, you’ll go back to Disk Management and see a changed hard drive landscape. If you made a primary partition, you will see your new drive letter. If you made an extended partition, things will look a bit different. Figure 12-48 shows the extended partition as free space because it has no logical drive yet. As you can easily guess from Figure 12-49, to create a logical drive, simply right-click in that extended partition and choose New Logical Drive. Disk Management fires up the New Partition Wizard again, this time with the option to create a logical drive.
Figure 12-48 Extended partition with no logical drives
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NOTE In Windows Vista, you cannot create extended partitions unless you already have three primary partitions on a drive and are creating a fourth. Microsoft has tried to simplify drive implementation as much as possible.
When you create a logical drive, the New Partition Wizard automatically gives you the same options to format the partition by using one of the three file systems you saw earlier with primary partitions (Figure 12-50). You get another confirmation screen, and then the Disk Management console shows you the newly created drive.
One interesting aspect of Windows is the tiny (approximately 8 MB) mysterious unallocated partition that shows up on the C: drive. The Windows installation program does this when you first install Windows on a new system, to reserve a space Windows needs for converting the C: drive to a dynamic disk. It doesn’t hurt anything and it’s tiny, so just leave it alone. If you want to make a volume and format it, feel free to do so.
Figure 12-49 Selecting to create a logical drive in the extended (free space) partition
Figure 12-50 The New Partition Wizard offering formatting options
Dynamic Disks
You create dynamic disks from basic disks in Disk Management. Once you convert a drive from a basic to a dynamic disk, primary and extended partitions no longer exist; dynamic disks are divided into volumes instead of partitions.
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EXAM TIP When you move a dynamic disk from one computer to another, it shows up in Disk Management as a foreign drive. You can import a foreign drive into the new system by right-clicking the disk icon and selecting Import Foreign Disks.
To convert a basic disk to dynamic, just right-click the drive icon and select Convert to Dynamic Disk (Figure 12-51). The process is very quick and safe, although the reverse is not true. The conversion from dynamic disk to basic disk first requires you to delete all partitions off of the hard drive.
Figure 12-51 Converting to a dynamic disk
Once you’ve converted, no partitions exist, only volumes. You can make five types of volumes on a dynamic disk: simple, spanned, striped, mirrored, and RAID 5,