If you need to add, remove, or configure a disk in Windows, then you’ll probably use the Disk Management utility. In this video, you’ll learn how to configure and use storage devices in the Windows Disk Management utility.
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The Windows Disk Management utility allows you to configure and manage all of the storage devices that are connected to your Windows operating system. You can certainly see the status of the drives you have connected to your system, you can mount, extend, partitions, split partitions, assign different drive letters, add new drives, and even add new arrays if you’d like to perform any type of array-type functionality across the drives that might be inside of your Windows operating system. You would access the Disk Management from your Administrative Tools. So in your Control Panel under Administrative Tools is Computer Management, and inside of Computer Management you will find the option for Disk Management.
On my Windows 7 desktop, I can find the Disk Management in Control Panel under Administrative Tools. There’s that option right at the top for Computer Management. And inside of Computer Management are a number of options– Task Scheduler, Event Viewer, et cetera. We want to choose the one under Storage that says Disk Management. And you can see that it will bring up a list of all of the storage devices that are connected to this particular computer.
I have a C drive on this computer that is called a simple layout. There is a basic type of NTFS on this device. It is healthy, and you can see all of the different options that are available on this particular boot system. Is has the Boot Drive, it has a Page File, all my crash dumps go onto this drive, and it is the primary partition for that particular volume. You can see the capacity size is how much is free, and notice it does not have any fault tolerant associated with it.
Notice you see all of that from that main screen. At the bottom of the screen are the lists of physical disks– a disk zero, a disk one. There’s also CD-ROM represented here, and it doesn’t have anything in the CD-ROM currently. On my disk zero, you’ll notice there are multiple partitions. There is a 100 megabyte NTFS partition that is a system reserve partition that’s created when you install Windows. That’s that extra partition that’s set aside in case we need to recover our operating system. There’s a much larger 24.9-gig NTFS partition, and that is the main partition of my computer.
I also have a separate disk that is a basic 9-megabyte disk. I’m running in a virtual environment, so I created a virtual disk. And I haven’t done anything to it yet, but if I right mouse click, you can create a new simple volume, and you can even go through the Wizard that allows you to set how big you’d like that volume to be. Maybe I’ll assign a drive letter O to that particular volume and perform a quick format. We will finish, and now I have a drive O. You can see everything changes on the top for that new volume that happens to be there. And you can see how much I’ve allocated and unallocated space for that particular disk. So I could add other partitions onto this disk as well just by going through that same process.
Now, if you recall, there were options when we right mouse clicked. Now those options are little different. I can mark this partition as active, I can change drive letters, I can reformat it, I can shrink it, I can delete it. All of my disk management happens right here in this utility. So if you’re trying to install a new drive in your Windows system, format it properly, make sure that it is partitioned with exactly the amount of space you want, you might want to use the Windows Disk Management capabilities to be able to all of that in one central console.