Hi, Char.
Each version of Windows since Win2K has had an improved, more-capable
version of Disk Management. I don't clearly recall just when each
improvement appeared, but it keeps getting better. At first, as you said,
it took over drive letter assignments, plus the functions previously done by
FDISK and Format.exe, and not much else.
Vista introduced one change that I don't much care for: Automatic creation
of the extended partition. My practice since I began dual-booting with
Win95/NT4 has been to create a single primary partition on each HDD and
include the rest of that disk in an extended partition, which I divide into
multiple logical drives.
Caution: Major digression in the next 3 paragraphs:
That arrangement came to me out of necessity at first. My 9 GB HDD was huge
for its day in about 1998. Win95/98 could not read NTFS and WinNT4 could
not read FAT32, so I had to limit each partition to the 2 GB that FAT(16)
could handle, because both Windows versions could read that. So I chose to
create the extended partition and make four 2 GB logical drives. That left
me with about 800 MB of my 9 GB, so that's the size I made a single primary
partition at the front of the disk, formatted FAT, and marked Active
(bootable). This became my System Partition, Drive C:. I ran Win95 Setup
to install Win95 on the first logical drive (D
, but it put its boot sector
and startup files (IO.sys, MSDOS.sys, Config.sys and Autoexec.bat) onto
Drive C: and the rest of Win95 into D:\Windows. Then I ran WinNT4 and it
rewrote the boot sector and added NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and Boot.ini to C:\
while installing the bulk of WinNT4 into E:\WinNT. So, C: was the System
Partition, D: was the boot volume for Win95 and E: was the boot volume for
WinNT4.
In the decade since, I've installed/deleted/reinstalled many versions of
Windows, but my basic disk organization has remained the same: one small
primary partition to serve as the System Partition, and multiple logical
drives to server as boot volumes for multiple Windows installations - and
for apps and data volumes.
Win2K and WinXP versions of Disk Management let me create the extended
partition directly. Starting in Vista, though, Disk Management
automatically creates the first 3 partitions as primary partitions. When
asked to create a 4th partition, it first creates an extended partition and
then creates a logical drive there. To get the single primary partition
that I want, I have to use the more-powerful DiskPart.exe shell - and its
command line interface.
Other changes in DM include showing multiple labels in the Status column.
In Win2K/XP, there could be only a single Status label, so if Drive C:
served as both System and Boot volume, only the System label was shown. In
Vista/Win7, we might see a half-dozen labels in the Status column: Healthy,
System, Active, Primary Partition (or Logical Drive), Boot, Page File, Crash
Dump.
DM can now Shrink and Extend a volume - but it can't move one; you'll still
need a third-party tool for that. It still irks me that DM can't remember
its display settings from one session to the next. I have to Maximize the
window and widen the Status column every time it runs. DM will also handle
dynamic disks and GPT disks, but I've not learned much about those.
Before Disk Management, I used Partition Manager, but I've hardly touched it
since DM arrived in Win2K, and not at all since WinXP. And I've never used
anything from Acronis, but I've heard many good reports about their
products.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64
