16.5 Disk Management

"Disk management" isn't just a cool, professional-sounding skill ”it's the name of yet another built-in Windows XP maintenance program, one that may be familiar to Windows 2000 veterans , but is completely new to people who are used to Windows Me and its predecessors.

To open this technical database of information about your disks and drives , you can use any of three methods :

• Choose Start Control Panel Administrative Tools Computer Management. In the resulting Computer Management window, double-click Disk Management in the list at the left side.

• In the Start menu, right-click My Computer. From the shortcut menu, choose Manage. Once again, double-click Disk Management in the list at the left side.

• Choose Start Run; type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter.

In any case, you arrive at the window shown in Figure 16-7. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a table of every disk (and partition of every disk) currently connected to your PC. In truth, the Disk Management window is a software toolkit that lets you operate on these drives, too. For example, Chapter 15 describes in detail how you can use this window to slice and dice the free space on your drives into new, combined "virtual disks" ( volumes ).

Figure 16-7. The Drive Management window is part of the much bigger, much more technical entity known as the Computer Management console. You access it by clicking Disk Management (in the left-side pane). Then you can operate on your drives by right-clicking them. Don't miss the View menu, by the way, which lets you change either the top or the bottom display. For example, you can make them display all of your disks instead of your volumes (there's a difference).

16.5.1 Change a Drive Letter

As you've probably noticed, Windows assigns a drive letter to each disk drive associated with your PC. The floppy disk drive is always A:, the primary internal hard drive is generally C:, and so on. Among other places, you see these letters in parentheses following the names of your drives, as when you choose Start My Computer.

Windows generally assigns these letters in the order that you install new drives to your system. You're not allowed to change the drive letter of your floppy drive or primary hard drive (usually the C: drive). You can, however, override the standard, unimaginative Windows letter assignments easily enough, as shown in Figure 16-8.

Figure 16-8. Right-click a drive icon as shown in Figure 15-7. From the shortcut menu, choose Change Drive Letter and Paths. Left: In this dialog box, click Change. Right: Then choose a letter that hasn't already been assigned. Click OK, and then approve your action in the confirmation box.

NOTE

If Windows XP is currently using files on the disk whose drive letter you're trying to change, Disk Management might create the new drive letter assignment but leave the old one intact until the next time you restart the computer. This is an effort not to pull the rug out from under any open files.

16.5.2 Partition a New Drive

The vast majority of Windows PCs have only one hard drive, represented in the My Computer window as a single icon.

Plenty of power users, however, delight in partitioning the hard drive ”dividing its surface so that it appears on the screen as two different icons with two different names. At that point, you can live like a king, enjoying the following advantages just like people who have two separate hard drives:

• You can keep Windows XP on one of them and Windows Me (for example) on the other, so that you can switch between the two at startup time. (You may hear this feature called dual booting , a procedure described on Section A.3.)

• Life is much easier if you frequently install and reinstall the operating system, or different versions of it. Doing so allows you to keep all your files safely on one partition, confining all the installing/uninstalling activity to the other.

• You can use multiple partitions to keep your operating system(s) separate from folders and files. In this way, you can perform a clean install of Windows (Section A.2) onto one partition without having to worry about losing any of your important files or installation programs.

Unfortunately, partitioning a hard drive using the tools built into Windows XP requires first erasing the hard drive completely. And that, of course, involves copying all of your files and programs onto some kind of backup disk first ”and then copying them back onto the hard drive when the process is over. Ponder this compromise, weighing it against the advantages of partitioning.

NOTE

You can partition your hard drive without having to erase everything on it ”just not for free. Commercial programs like PartitionMagic ( http://www.powerquest.com ) create, resize, merge, and convert partitions without disturbing any of your files.

The Disk Management program included with Windows XP, therefore, is best suited for creating new partitions on new or empty hard drives. Ditto for FDISK, a DOS utility that can also do the job (as described in Appendix A).

In the Disk Management window, free space (suitable for turning into a partition of its own) shows up with a black bar and the label Unallocated. Figure 16-7, for example, depicts a brand new hard drive that hasn't yet been named or sliced up into partitions. The whole thing is still " unallocated ."

To create a new partition, right-click one of these unallocated segments. From the shortcut menu, choose New Partition. A wizard appears, whose screens ask you:

• What kind of partition you want to create. (You'll usually want Primary.)

• How big you want the partition to be. If you're dividing up a 60 GB drive, for example, you might decide to make the first partition 20 GB and the second 40 GB. You'd begin by creating the 20 GB partition (right-clicking the big "Unallocated" bar in Figure 16-7); when that was over, you'd see a smaller Unallocated chunk still left in the Disk Management window. You'd right-click it and choose New Partition again, this time accepting the partition size the wizard proposes (which is all the remaining free space).

• What drive letter you want to assign to it.

• What disk-formatting scheme you want to apply to it (you'll usually choose NTFS ”see Section A.4).

When the wizard is through with you, it's safe to close the window. A quick look at your My Computer window will confirm that you now have new "disks" (actually partitions of the same disk), which you can use for different purposes.

NOTE

Partitioning and disk management can go even farther. You can resize your disk volumes, combine the space from multiple disks into one large volume, and perform other advanced stunts, as described in Chapter 15.

16.5.3 Turn a Drive into a Folder

Talk about techie: Most people could go their entire lives without needing this feature, or even imagining that it exists. But Microsoft loves power users, and this one's for them.

Using the Paths feature of Disk Management, you can actually turn a hard drive (or partition) into a folder on another hard drive (or partition). Each of these disks-disguised-as-folders is technically known as a mounted volume, junction point, or drive path . See Figure 16-9 for details.

Figure 16-9. Left: Man, how many CD drives does this guy have? Just one. But through the miracle of mounted volumes, it's appearing in as many different folders as the owner likes. You could do the same thing with a hard drive ”make it appear as a folder icon on any other drive. Right: Here's how to do it: Designate an empty folder to be the receptacle ”a metaphysical portal ”for the drive's contents.

This arrangement affords the following unique possibilities:

• In effect, you can greatly expand capacity of your main hard drive ”by installing a second hard drive that masquerades as a folder on the first one.

• You can turn a burned CD into a folder on your main hard drive, too ”a handy way to fool your programs into thinking that the files they're looking for are still in the same old place on your hard drive. (You could pull this stunt in a crisis ”when the "real" folder has become corrupted or has been thrown away.)

• If you're a power power user with lots of partitions, disks, and drives, you may feel hemmed in by the limitation of only 26 assignable letters (A through Z). Turning one of your disks into a mounted volume bypasses that limitation, however. A mounted volume doesn't need a drive letter at all.

• A certain disk can be made to appear in more than one place at once. You could put all your MP3 files on a certain disk or partition ”and then make it show up as a folder in the My Music folder of everyone who uses the computer.

NOTE

You can only create a mounted volume on an NTFS -formatted hard drive (see Section A.4).

To bring about this arrangement, visit the Disk Management window, and then right-click the icon of the disk or partition that you want to turn into a mounted volume. From the shortcut menu, choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.

In the Change Drive Letter and Paths dialog box, click Add; in the next dialog box, click Browse. Navigate to and select an empty folder ”the one that will represent the disk. (Click New Folder if you didn't create one in advance, as shown at right in Figure 16-9.) Finally, click OK.

Once the deed is done, take time to note a few special characteristics of a mounted volume:

• The mounted volume may behave just like a folder, but its icon is a dead giveaway, since it still looks like a hard drive (or CD drive, or DVD drive, or whatever).

  Still, if you're in doubt about what it is, you can right-click it and choose Properties from the shortcut menu. You'll see that the Type information says "Mounted Volume," and the Target line identifies the disk from which it was made.

• Avoid circular references, in which you turn two drives into folders on each other. Otherwise, you risk throwing your programs into a spasm of infinite-loop thrashing.

• To undo your mounted-drive effect, return to the Disk Management program and choose View Drive Paths. You're shown a list of all the drives you've turned into folders; click one and then click Remove. You've just turned that special, "I'm really a drive" folder into an ordinary empty folder.