Disk Management( Comptia Objective 1.5) Flashcards
What is the primary purpose of Disk Management?
- Used to manage disk operations for individual computers and file servers.
- Can be found by searching for “ Computer Management” and then select “ Storage/Disk Management” .
- Computer Management can be found by either using the search bar and searching for it or going into the control panel and then under administrative tools..
What is an important factor to consider when using the Computer Management/Disk Management utility?
- WARNING YOU COULD ERASE YOUR DATA!!!
- Data could become unrecoverable.
When talking about Disk status what does this refer to?
- The health of the drive( healthy, at risk, faulty etc)
- The type of file system used( e.g NTFS, FAT32 etc)
- And the volume size as well.
- Will also tell you if the drive is basic or Dynamic( Such as for a RAID array)
What does a “ Healthy(At Risk)” disk status mean?
- The volume has experienced some I/O errors and drive may be failing but is still operational.
If you are using a new drive what disk status might you see that is completely normal?
- May say “ Initializing” which is a normal startup message.
If you have a faulty drive or one that can’t be accessed what type of message could you see?
- ” Failed”
- The disk cannot be started automatically
- Disk status may show this because the disk is damaged or the file system is corrupted.
If one or more drives have failed as part of your RAID storage on your computer what message might you see inside of Disk Status?
- ” Failed redundancy” which means a drive has failed in a RAID 1 or RAID 5 array.
- After replacing a failed drive as part of a RAID 1 array you will see a disk status that says “ Resynching” which means Mirrored( RAID 1) volume is synching data between the drives.
- In a RAID 5 array if there is a failed drive that is replaced you will see a disk status message that says “ regenerating” which means RAID 5 volume is recreating the data based on the parity data.
In an office environment you are constantly running out of drive space to deal with this instead of installing a new separate drive that has it’s own file structure and drive letter what else can you do?
- You can Mount A Drive
- This means extending available storage space and mounting a separate storage device as a folder instead of being a separate drive altogether.
- You can simply mount the drive inside of an empty folder where ever you need it. This means instant storage space and is seamless to the user.
How would you go about mounting a drive to a folder inside of Disk Management?
- First go to Disk Management inside of Computer Management
- Next go to disk volume of the new drive you have installed should say “ New Volume” and will not have been assigned a drive letter.
- From there you will right click on the volume and select “ change driver letter and paths” and choose add.
- You then will be prompted to either assign a drive letter or choose the option to “mount in the following empty NTFS folder”. You select mount in folder and then browse for the location of the folder that you would like to mount the drive to and presto you’re done.
If for some reason you decide that you don’t need to use up the entire drive space used for mounting inside a folder you can choose to reduce the size of the drive. How would you go about doing this?
- You right click on the drive volume you want to shrink and select “ shrink volume”
- You then select the amount that you would want to remove from the original drive volume in MB under the “ Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB” field
- Next you hit the shrink button and you’re done.
- You will then see your disk storage split into two parts. One part which is already partitioned and the other new volume which will say “ Unallocated” .
- If you ever needed to add back in storage you would essentially repeat the process but instead of right clicking and selecting “ shrink volume” you would select “ extend volume” and select the amount of space to add.
In some versions of Windows inside of Disk Management you can also create RAID arrays when you have multiple drives installed in your system. How would you go about doing that inside of disk management?
- For e.g. if you have two identical drives which are the same size etc and wanted to create a RAID 1 mirrored array you would right click on one of the drive volumes( both must be unallocated) and select new mirrored volume.
- The mirrored volume wizard will open and you can select create new volume click next, and then you will see you have two disks one that is already selected and the other available click on that to create a mirror and hit next
- Next you will be asked to select a drive letter for this RAID array or to mount the drive array to a folder. Click next which will now format the drives using the NTFS file system format. From there you will select “ perform a quick format” and hit next and then click finish.
- Once the formatting has completed you will now have a new disk volume which exactly half of that of the two drives combined( RAID 1) and the volume will be labelled as “ New Volume”
What is “Storage Spaces” and what is it used for?
- Storage for data center, cloud infrastructures( multiple tiers, administrative control.)
- A storage pool is a group of storage drives which can be combined into a single pool that can be used. It’s then easy to add or remove space in the pool as needed.
- Once a storage pool has been created you can then create an actual storage space where you can allocate virtual disks from available space in the pool, includes options for mirroring and parity RAID arrays. In the event that a mirrored or parity drive array fails you have the option to use a hot spare and rebuild the array immediately.
