ORGANIZING YOUR HARD DISKS WAS NEVER SO SIMPLE
Disk Administrator is the main tool in Windows NT for maintaining
and configuring hard disks. With Disk Administrator, you can create and remove
partitions and logical drives and format disks. It lets you set up volume sets
and implement some performance and fault tolerance features such as disk
mirroring, striping, and striping with parity.
When you start Disk Administrator for the first time (its icon is in the
Administrative Tools program group in NT 3.51, and under the Administrative
Tools folder in NT 4.0), it will ask you for permission to write a signature on
the disk. The signature helps Disk Administrator identify the disk, even if you
shift the disk to a different controller. Disk Administrator will not let you
proceed unless you grant signature permission and will repeat this request when
you add new disks to the system.
Disk Administrator displays odd behavior in NT 3.51. Often, when you start
Disk Administrator, it disappears behind other open windows. You have to cycle
through the open windows or minimize them to get to it.
When you first open Disk Administrator, you will see something like Screen 1. In NT 4.0, Disk Administrator has more capabilities and more customization options than in NT 3.51. For example, CD-ROM drives appear just like any other disk on a display. In the future, I expect a variety of devices to show up here, including Digital Video Disc (DVD), optical, Jaz drives, and so on. You can adjust the Region Display to show each region of the drives
as an equal area or proportionally spaced. But the easiest way is to let Disk
Administrator decide how to show the regions. Color coding will show volume sets
and stripe sets.
Allocating Space
Use Disk Administrator to allocate the space remaining on your hard drives
after you install your system's partition. Suppose you install NT on a new
computer and, during installation, allocate space only for the C partition. Disk
Administrator can allocate the remaining space on the same disk or the space on
the other disks. Simply select (with the mouse) an area of free space, and
select Partition, Create to add a partition. Disk Administrator does not
add the partition at this point, but it shows up on the screen. This approach
ensures that you can still back out of changes if you make a mistake and
explains why you cannot format the disk yet--Tools, Format is dimmed.
You must exit the utility or select Partition, Commit Changes Now to
implement changes you make in Disk Administrator. Once you create the new
partition, you can format the assigned space.
Be careful how you allocate this space. If you make all the free space an
extended partition and then assign logical drives in the extended partition, you
can remove the partition later, even with FDISK, a DOS-based hard disk
partition-management utility. But if you create NT File System (NTFS) drives as
individual non-DOS drives, the only way to remove them is either with Disk
Administrator or using the NT Setup program. If you remove NT and then try to
use FDISK from DOS to remove these partitions, FDISK will not remove the
partitions, because they contain logical drives. FDISK cannot identify the
logical drives to remove them. Sometimes FDISK will remove the partitions if you
ignore the warning messages, but often it will not. You can work around this
situation with a program such as PartitionMagic, a hard disk management utility
from PowerQuest. (For a description of this utility, see "PartitionMagic.")
Because Microsoft encounters this problem in classrooms, an unsupported
utility, delpart.exe, comes with Microsoft's NT class instructor materials. You
can download the compressed utility as drlprt.exe, with instructions, from
Microsoft's bulletin boards (BBS number 206-936-6735), Web site (www.microsoft.
com), or CompuServe forum (GO MICROSOFT). Be aware that delpart.exe will remove
any partition, so use it carefully. If you have SCSI drives, a low-level format
will remove any existing partitions, but reformatting is a last resort.
Formatting
The Windows NT 4.0 version of Disk Administrator adds the capability to set
the cluster or allocation unit size for NTFS disks. (The FORMAT /A option in NT
3.51 lets you set these sizes from the command prompt, but this capability is
not available in Disk Administrator.) NT 4.0 Disk Administrator uses a default
cluster size of 4096 bytes. Valid cluster sizes are 512, 1024, 2048, and 4096
bytes when set from Disk Administrator and up to 64KB from the command line. The
size of the logical drive determines cluster sizes on File Allocation Table
(FAT) disks, of course.
Assigning Drive Letters
NT is more flexible than DOS for assigning drive letters. For example, NT
does not require you to assign the letters for the hard disk drive first, and
then for the CD-ROM drives. This flexibility lets you avoid having to reassign
drive letters. (Some software keeps track of the drive from which you install
it, and updates can be awkward if the drive letter has changed.) Your CD-ROM can
still be drive E, with a hard disk designated as drive F. If this notation
offends your sense of tradition, you can assign the CD-ROM a letter such as M or
N, which will leave plenty of room for adding disk drives later, and assign the
next available letter to the new drives.
To assign a drive letter in NT 3.51, choose Tools, Assign Drive
Letter, or Assign CD-ROM Drive Letter. In NT 4.0, right-click the
drive to summon the Properties shortcut menu. From Properties, as you see in
Screen 2, you can assign a new drive letter. With either version of NT,
pick the drive letter, and Disk Administrator assigns it immediately. If you get
a message that the drive letter cannot be reassigned because a lock is on the
drive, you may have an open application that is using a file on this drive. Or
perhaps File Manager or Explorer is open, pointing to this drive, and maybe even
someone is connected to this drive across the network. You can close the
application, you can drop network connections through the Server icon in Control
Panel, or you can reboot.
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