Overview of Disk Management

Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, Windows Vista

Disk Management is a system utility for managing hard disks and the volumes or partitions that they contain. With Disk Management, you can initialize disks, create volumes, and format volumes with the FAT, FAT32, or NTFS file systems. Disk Management enables you to perform most disk-related tasks without restarting the system or interrupting users. Most configuration changes take effect immediately.

In this version of Windows, Disk Management provides the same features you may already be familiar with from earlier versions, but also adds some new features:

• Simpler partition creation. When you right-click a volume, you can choose whether to create a basic, spanned, or striped partition directly from the menu.

• Disk conversion options. When you add more than four partitions to a basic disk, you are prompted to convert the disk to dynamic or to the GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

• Extend and shrink partitions. You can extend and shrink partitions directly from the Windows interface.

Additional resources

• Checklist: Add a New Disk

• Manage Disks

• Manage Basic Volumes

• Manage Dynamic Volumes

• Create a Striped Volume

• Troubleshooting Disk Management

• Resources for Disk Management

• For more in-depth information about Disk Management, including best practices and concepts, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=64097.

• In Windows Server 2008 R2, you can set up disk mirroring (RAID1) for the operating system volume by using only tools already built into the operating system. For detailed steps for setting up disk mirroring, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=191163 at the Microsoft Download Center.