Manage basic disks and dynamic disks.

Basic Disks

You can only create up to 4 partitions on a basic disk, either 4 primary partitions, or three primary partitions and 1 extended partition. The extended partition can contain one or more logical drives. Each partition functions as a physically separate unit of storage. The Master Boot Record strores the information about the location and size of each partition.

Dynamic Disks

Dynamic disks are Microsoft prefered partitioning scheme. On WinNT 4.0 or earlier operating systems, basic volumes support volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets and stripe sets with parity. But in order to encourage the use of dynamic disks, multipartition volume support was removed from the basic partitioning scheme since Win2k.

Dynamic disks start with MBR(Master Boot Recor), continued with a LDM(Logical Disk Manager)  partition, and ends with LDM database.

The MBR exists for backward compatibility. And the LDM databse holds the partitioning information used by LDM. No matter how much information it contains, it uses exactly 1MB of disk space. Therefore, Windows cannot convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk unless there is at least 1MB of free space on the disk.

Simple Volume

A simple volume on a dynamic disk is equal to a basic disk partition. A simple volume can utilize space from a SINGLE physical disk, it can be extended by appending unallocated space on the physical disk, and it is NOT fault tolerant.

Spanned Volume

A spanned volume can utilize space from 2 to 32 physical disks. Data is written to the volume begin from the first disk. When the space on the first disk fullfills, the second disk is written to, and so on.

The spanned volumes are not fault-tolerant. Because multiple disks are involved in a spanned volume, the risk for failure increases. The entire volume will be lost if any ONE disk fails. Thus Windows Server 2003 will allow neither the installation of the operating system on a spanned volume, nor spanning the system volume.

RAID-0

Also known as striped volume. A RAID-0 volume is just like a spanned volume except that data is written to all physical disk at the same rate. The read/write performance increase significantly.

RAID-0 is not fault tolerant either.

RAID-1

Also known as mirrored volume. A mirrored volume consists of 2 identical copies of a simple volume, each on a separate hard disk. RAID-1 is fault tolerant.

RAID-5

Also called striped volume with parity. Space on 3 or more disks is unified as a single volume. The data is interlaced with checksum information. In case a single disk fails, data on that disk can be regenerated through caculations.

RAID-5 is fault-tolerant.

The Performance Counters Used to Monitor Disks

Such as Free Space, Avg. Disk Queue Length, etc.

Moving Disks Between Servers

Before disconnecting disks from the old server, we must make sure the status of all volumes on each disk is healthy. For a volume that is not healthy, repair it before moving. After physically connecting the disks to the new server, we should open Action menu and choose Rescan Disks. After the new server detect the disks and brings them online, we should import them to make the disks usable on the new server.

Adding New Disks

Adding new disks may cause problem because the boot.ini file needs to be corrected to reflect the new disk configuration. We can use the Bootcfg utility in the Recovery Console to correct this problem. Use the Bootcfg utility in the Recovery Console to correct the Boot.ini file:

1. Use the Windows XP CD-ROM to start your computer.
2. When you receive the message to press R to repair Windows by using the Recovery
Console, press the R key.
3. Select the Windows installation that you want, and then type the administrator
password when prompted.
4. Type bootcfg /rebuild, and then press ENTER.
5. When the Windows installation is located, the following instructions are displayed:
Add installation to boot list? (Yes/No/All)
[Type Y in response to this message.]