Manage partitions with Disk Management - Windows Tutorial

- [Narrator] A computer's hard disk is where the operating system, program files, personal data and other information are stored. Most personal and work computers only have a single hard disk installed. The most common place to view a hard disk configuration is from File Explorer. Click This PC to see how your computer's configured. Here, mine has a simple, hard drive and one DVD drive. You might also see a backup drive or a USB drive. If you see what looks like a physical drive, but you don't think it is, it might be a partition. A partition is an area on a basic disk, like the disks you see in most computers used by consumers and employees that is allocated to hold data, operating system files, virtual machines and so on, but is not a real physical disk. While File Explorer can show you the computer's basic makeup, to see how your computer is configured with regard to partitions and physical drives, you'll need to open Disk Management. You can do that by right clicking start and choosing disk management. On this computer, there are several partitions on a single hard drive. There's a recovery partition that holds recovery files. There's a primary partition that holds the operating system, boot and page files, and so on. There's also this 99 megabyte healthy system partition. All of this is on disk zero. You can shrink a primary partition and create additional partitions if you like to personalize how your hard drive is configured. Sometimes I do this to set aside a specific place for the virtual machines I create and I sometimes give that partition a drive letter, a V for virtual machines. You can create a partition for data too, or create a place to install another operating system, Whatever the use for it, to create a partition, first right click the partition you want to shrink. Generally, this is the primary partition. You shouldn't choose a recovery partition or any partition that contains a system image. I'll right click C and choose shrink volume. Notice I use the word volume here instead of partition. And that's what is offered in the contextual menu. There's a fine line between a partition and a volume. Briefly, a partition is an unallocated area of the hard drive, and that partition becomes a volume after it's been formatted with a file system. When prompted, enter the amount of space to shrink in megabytes or accept the default. Read what's offered here as well. It says you can't shrink a volume beyond the point where any unremovable files are located. When you're ready, click shrink. Remember that a partition is just an area of the disk that's been set aside for later use. As you can see here in disk management, it says our new space is unallocated. That partition isn't that much use until it's formatted. If you look back up at File Explorer, you'll see it isn't even listed there. However, if you right click this new partition and opt to create a new simple volume and work through that wizard, it will appear in File Explorer and it will be ready to use. So let's do that. I'll right click the unallocated area and I'll choose new simple volume. I'll click next to get started. This is where I define the simple volume size. I'm going to just accept this default and click next. Now I assign a drive letter. I'll assign N for new volume and I'll click next. I'm going to want it to have the NTFS file system and I'll go ahead and let it perform a quick format and click next again. And I'll click finish. Here's our new volume. It has the drive letter N and I accepted the default name of new volume, which is very creative, and you can see here. Now let's take a look at File Explorer and see what's offered. Here's our new volume. You can see it's empty and there's nothing on it. Remember that a simple volume is formatted with a file system, which means it can hold an operating system, virtual disks, data, and so on. This type of partition doesn't offer any fault tolerance, though. If you want to protect what's on the disk, you'll need a backup strategy, such as an external hard disk or system image. There's another type of volume though. And that's dynamic volume. If your computer is configured with dynamic disks, you can create dynamic volumes. It's likely you've never worked with these before though, unless you've worked in an IT department or with complicated servers. Dynamic volumes can be configured to be fault tolerant. And there are three kinds, mirrored, spanned and striped. Mirrored volumes use two disks and the data on each is an exact copy. This provides fault tolerance. If one disk fails, the other is there for backup. Mirrored volumes are called RAID 1. RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. Spanned Volumes can use unallocated space on two to 32 disks, and looks like a single logical disk to the operating system. You use this when you want to create disk space using multiple disks. Spanned volumes do not provide fault tolerance. If any of the disk fails, the data will need to be recovered from backups. Striped volumes improve write performance by writing data to multiple disks in stripes across a disk you configure. It's called RAID 0, and this does not protect data from loss if a disk fails. It does offer pretty fast write times though. If you want to use a multiple volumes to stripe data, while at the same time, creating parity to recover from a disk failure in the disk array, you need to implement RAID 5. However, if this is the case, consider using storage spaces, which I'll discuss in a later movie. Let's take one more look at disk management before we finish up. Right-click disk zero in the left pane. You could, if you wanted, convert this to a dynamic disk. I'm going to advise against this though, at least on any machine you use regularly. That's because when you convert a dynamic disk with volumes to a basic disk, you'll lose all your data. Not only that, it could render the computer unbootable. You should only convert to dynamic disks after you've spent some time learning about how and why to do it and with what systems they're compatible. Finally, before we end here, I want to show you how to delete the volume and undo what you just created. I'll right click the new volume and choose delete volume and click Yes. Now I've got my C drive and some unallocated space. So I'll right click the C drive. I'll choose extend and I'll add that back in. There, just like it was when we started.