Disk Management Functions
The Disk Management plug-in can be used to carry out a number of functions, including the following:
- Create partitions, logical drives and volumes.
- Delete partitions, logical drives and volumes.
- Format partitions and volumes.
- Mark partitions as active.
- Assign or modify drive letters for hard disk volumes, removable disk drives, and CD-ROM drives.
- Obtain a quick visual overview of the properties of all disks and volumes in the system.
- Create mounted drives on systems using the NTFS file system.
- Convert basic disks to dynamic disks.
- Convert dynamic disks to basic disks, although this is a destructive operation.
- On dynamic disks, create spanned, striped, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.
Disk Management makes extensive use of context menus. Right clicking on a drive or partition will normally present a menu that contains the options and procedures available for the particular device. The Action menu item is an alternate method for determining the same information. One advantage of using Disk Management is that the majority of changes you can make don't require rebooting the system so you can continue working while the procedures complete.
One of the major limitations of Disk Management is the inability to resize a partition to make it smaller in a non-destructive manner. That limitation, and others, can be overcome by a number of third-party utilities.
Next: Creating a New Partition
