CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

4.1. Understanding Operating System Utilities for Disk Maintenance

In this section, you examine different utilities that you can use to perform disk maintenance on your system. These utilities include fdisk and Disk Management, defrag, and chkdsk. Each of these utilities serves a specific purpose for your operating system.

4.1.1. diskpart.exe and Disk Management

Before you can store any data on your disk, you need to prepare the disk for use. You can use the diskpart.exe utility to prepare your disk to hold data if you are using the Windows Recovery Console, or you can use Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) if you are in Windows.

Data is stored on a disk in a partition, and that partition is assigned a drive letter. Because of decisions made when early computer disks were created, you are allowed to create only four partitions on a disk, and a table was created in the disk's BIOS to hold the partitioning information. The partition table has only four entries in it. The solution to the four-partition limit was to create a special partition, which is always stored in the last partition. This special partition is an extended partition, and it is designed to extend the number of drive letters you can associate with a drive. Remember that this is four, the same as the number of partitions. The extended partition does not have a drive letter associated with it, but rather allows you to create any number of logical drives within it, each of which do have drive letters.

Windows allows you ...