Windows 7 / Getting Started

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The Disk Management nickel tour

Windows 7 comes with several disk partitioning tools, but the most useful is Disk Management. You can use Disk Management to view the partitions of any drive on your system, as well as create, delete, and resize partitions, and even change the drive letters for any drives or partitions on your PC. Open the Start menu, and in the Search box, type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter.

The main Disk Management window is divided into two panes, each of which shows the same information in different ways. (You can change the arrangement of the panes by going to View → Top or View → Bottom, but Disk Management won't remember any of your settings for next time.)

The Graphical View, shown in the lower pane by default, is easily the most useful, and is the subject of most of the rest of this section. The Volume List, shown in the upper pane by default, shows only your hard disk drive letters, and is a subset of the drive list in Windows Explorer. And the Disk List is merely a list of the physical disk devices in your PC, somewhat like the Disk Drives branch in Device Manager.

Open the Disk Management utility to add or remove partitions, shuffle drive letters, and even change the way volumes are mounted.

By default, the boxes in the Graphical View representing multiple partitions (volumes) are not displayed proportionally to their size; a 20 GB partition will appear to be roughly the same size as a 100 GB partition. To fix this, go to View → Settings, choose the Scaling tab, and select the According to capacity, using linear scaling option in both sections. You can also customize the program's colors with the Appearance tab, but unless you follow the steps in "Save Settings in Disk Management" (the upcoming), your changes will be lost as soon as you close the window.

Disk Management takes an active role in making drives available in Windows Explorer. Most of the time, as soon as you insert a flash memory card into your card reader or pop in a CD or DVD, the new volume appears in Disk Management and Explorer. But sometimes, Disk Management may fail to acknowledge that you've connected a device (say, an external hard disk), and as a result, its drive letter won't appear in Explorer. To force Windows to recognize your drive changes, press the F5 key or go to Action → Rescan Disks, and in a few seconds, the newly connected drive should appear in all windows.

If it doesn't, open up Device Manager, and from the Action menu there, select Scan for hardware changes.

Save Settings in Disk Management

The Disk Management tool is actually what Microsoft calls a "snap-in" for the Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe). Other snap-ins include Device Manager, the Services window, and the Group Policy Object Editor.

The .msc file you launch to open the Disk Management tool is not actually the program, but rather just a small console file, which contains only the settings for the current view. Although you can't save your customizations to diskmgmt.msc, you can create a new console file with the snap-ins you need, and customize it to your heart's content:

1. Open the Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe). A new, blank Console Root window will appear in the MMC window.
2. Go to File → Add/Remove Snap-in, and then click Add.
3. Select Disk Management from the Available Standalone Snap-ins list, and then click Add.
4. From the window that appears, select This Computer and then click Finish.
5. You can add other snap-ins at this point, or just click OK when you're done.
6. If Disk Management is the only snap-in you selected, highlight the Disk Management entry in the tree on the left to show the tool in the center pane. Then go to View → Customize, turn off the Console tree and Action pane options, and click OK.
7. Now, you can customize Disk Management as you see fit. For instance, to show only the Graphical View, select View → Top → Graphical View and then View → Bottom → Hidden.
8. When you're finished customizing, go to File → Save to save your custom console view into a new .msc file such as Disk Management.msc.

The next time you use Disk Management, just open your custom .msc file instead of diskmgmt.msc to use your customized tool.

In the Graphical View, you'll see different kinds of partitions; here are the most common:

Primary partition
Most partitions are of this type. If you have more than one partition, the first usable partition (one that can hold data) is almost always a primary. Primary partitions are marked with a dark blue stripe by default.
The old school approach is to have only one primary partition, followed by an extended partition (discussed next). This is no longer needed for NTFS volumes; in fact, if you're setting up a dual-boot system, each OS must have its own primary partition.

Extended partition
The extended partition is a holdover from earlier days, and was used when a drive had two or more partitions. It doesn't actually hold data, it merely serves as a container for one or more logical drives (discussed next). Extended partitions and logical drives are more or less obsolete today (Disk Management can't even create them), but you may see them on older partitioned drives. The extended partition is, by default, shown as a dark green outline surrounding any logical drives.

Logical drive
If you have a drive with an extended partition, each volume inside is called a logical drive. See the notes for primary and extended partitions, earlier, for details. By default, logical drives are identified in light blue.

EISA Configuration
This is a tiny partition that holds configuration data for the rest of the drive, and it is typically placed at the beginning of the disk. You'll see this on most RAID drives and often on drives installed in massproduced PCs. Disk Management can't delete EISA Configuration partitions, but Acronis Disk Director (see the section "Resize and move partitions" in this tutorial) can.

System Reserved
Windows 7 setup creates a 100 MB "System Reserved" partition when you install on a blank hard disk (Professional edition or better). To keep this from happening and use your entire hard disk for the Windows installation.