Mastering Windows Server® 2008 Networking Foundations

Chapter 9. Windows Storage Concepts and Skills

Computer storage refers to many things. In this chapter I will cover everything you need to know about Windows Server 2008's hard drives, partition styles and types, volumes, file systems, encryption, disk quotas, Remote Storage, and Volume Shadow Copies. I will show you how to perform disk management tasks in both the DiskManagement GUI and from the command-line interface tool DiskPart.

Disk Management versus DiskPart

The Disk Management tool made its debut in Windows 2000 and allows you to perform disk management tasks. Some of those tasks are to create and delete partitions and logical drives, as well as gather status information concerning partition sizes, available free space, volume labels, drive-letter assignment, file system type, and the health of your disks. The Disk Management tool is the GUI way of managing your storage and is a very effective tool for seeing the logical layout of your disks, complete with a color-coded legend to help identify the kind of disk and the various flavors of partitions or volumes contained on those disks.

The command-line utility that allows you to manage your disks is Diskpart.exe and is installed by default with Server 2008. Why should I bore you with the command-line interface (CLI)? Well, there are a few reasons. Microsoft's new Server 2008 OS called Server Core contains no GUIs at all, so DiskPart is the only way to configure your disks. DiskPart is also easily scriptable. When we get into ...