Introduction

Most computers have multiple file systems such as physical drives, network drives, and removable drives that you as the administrator need to manage. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to manage local and network disk drives and file systems. You will learn how to perform administrative file system tasks such as partitioning your disk drive, formatting your disk drive, sharing files with remote users, and using tools like FSUTIL, DiskPart, and Disk Manager.

Managing Basic and Dynamic Disks

Throughout the years, storage requirements and drive sizes have changed, increasing in both cases. In the early 90s, it was nearly unheard of for personal computers to use more than one physical hard drive. Now it doesn t seem so strange. Requirements such as fault tolerance, multiple partitions, and quick accessibility are some of the necessities today. In years past, no one would have ever thought more than 50 to 100MB would be needed on a hard drive. Now we see laptops alone with close to 200GB drives. With these new requirements and drive sizes comes the need to better manage data storage.

Since Windows 2000, we ve had two different disk types: basic disks and dynamic disks. A basic disk is one that can be accessed by MS-DOS and previous versions of Windows, depending on the file system installed. Basic disks use the same structure as previous versions of Windows, so if you have a system that s a multiboot system with an older version of Windows NT 4.0,...