1. The Windows 7
Disk-Management Toolkit
The principal
disk-management tool in Windows 7 is the Disk Management console, Disk
mgmt.msc. For those who need to incorporate disk-management tasks in
scripts (as well as for those who simply prefer carrying out
administrative tasks at the command prompt), Windows also provides a
powerful command-prompt program called Diskpart. Everything that you can
do with Disk Management you can also do using Diskpart; you just have
to work harder and more carefully.
If you've come to
Windows 7 directly from Windows XP and have some familiarity with the
disk-management tools in that earlier operating system, you'll find
significant improvements in Windows 7. (These changes were introduced
with Windows Vista.) Most notably, you can now shrink partitions as well
as expand them from within the console. If you have a writable CD or
DVD drive, you'll also appreciate the Windows 7 support for the
Universal Disk Format (UDF).
With UDF, you can write folders and files to CDs and DVDs as easily (if
not as quickly) as you can write them to a hard disk. And if, like many
others, you rely on portable computers or external hard disks (USB,
IEEE 1394, or eSATA drives), you will be pleased to know that Windows
now supports dynamic disks as well as basic disks on those devices.
2.
Running Disk Management
To run Disk Management, do
any of the following:
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.
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.
Figure 1 illustrates the Disk Management console.
Disk Management provides a
wealth of
information about physical disks and the volumes, partitions, and
logical drives in place on those disks. 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
The Disk Management
display is in two panes. In its default arrangement, the upper pane
lists each volume on your system and provides information about the
volume's type, status, capacity, available free space, and so on. You
can carry out commands on a volume by right-clicking in the first column
of this pane
(the column labeled Volume) and choosing from the shortcut menu.
In the lower pane,
each row represents one physical device. In the headings at the left of each row, you see
the name by which the device is known to the operating system (Disk 0,
Disk 1, and so on), along with its type, size, and status. To the right
are rectangles representing the volumes of each device. Note that the
rectangles are not drawn to scale.
Right-clicking a
heading at the left in the lower pane provides a menu of commands pertinent to an entire storage device.
Right-clicking a volume rectangle provides a menu of actions applicable
to that volume.
