Managing Disks and Volumes

Windows 7 offers several tools and utilities that assist you in working with disks and volumes, including removable disks. We discuss configuring policies with removable disks later in this tutorial. You can use the Computer Management Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in or the DiskPart command-line utility to manage disks.

The Computer Management tool, shown in Figure below, enables you to manage disks and other storage devices in Windows 7. To open Computer Management, right-click Computer and select Manage from the shortcut menu. Computer Management offers the following tools and utilities:

• Task Scheduler: Used for configuring programs and utilities to run at predetermined times and repeated schedules.
• Event Viewer: Used for troubleshooting errors.
• Shared Folders: Used for managing shares and connections to your computer.
• Local Users and Groups: Used for managing local users and groups on the computer.
• Performance: Used for troubleshooting errors as well as optimizing performance.
• Device Manager: Used for configuring devices, updating or uninstalling device drivers, rolling back device drivers, enabling and disabling devices, and troubleshooting.
• Disk Management: Used for viewing and managing volume and disk configuration.
• Services: Used for starting and stopping services related to a device.
• WMI Control: Used for turning error logging on or off or backing up the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) repository (in most cases, you will not use this tool).

The following list summarizes the major actions you can perform from the Disk Management snap-in:

• Create Dynamic Disks: Disks can be either basic (the default) or dynamic. You can convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, but you cannot change back. Your only avenue to reverting to a basic disk is by deleting all volumes on the dynamic disk, losing the data, creating a new basic volume, and restoring the data from a backup.
• Create Volumes: You can create several types of volumes on a dynamic disk. Microsoft provides a wizard to assist you in creating these volumes.
• Extend Volumes: You can add additional unallocated space on a disk to an existing volume. Windows 7 provides the Extend Volume Wizard to assist you in this action.
• Shrink Volumes: You can reduce the size of a volume to generate unallocated space for creating or extending a different volume.
• Display Properties of Disks and Volumes: For disks, you can obtain the same information as provided by Device Manager. For volumes, you can obtain information about free space and device properties. This feature also lets you defragment the volume, share the volume, configure an access control list (ACL), back up all files on the volume, and create shadow copies of files and folders within the volume.