Windows 2000 and 2003 disk storage management

Important pointers for windows 2000/2003 OS disk management are:
There are two type of disk storage, basic and dynamic. Basic disk supports partitions, which are of fixed size on a hard disk. A max of four primary or three primary and one extended (with logical drives) are allowed within a basic disk. Dynamic disks support volumes, which are re-sizable. Both types of disks can co-exist within a single system. Only windows 2000 and later OS support dynamic disks.

An active partition is the one, where the computer looks for boot files to start an OS. Windows system partition is the active partition containing hardware-specific files required to load OS. Windows boot partition contains OS files and can be a primary or extended partition other than active.

There are five types of volumes on a dynamic disk. Simple, spanned stripped, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes. Choose among them for reasons of fault-tolerance, performance and disk space. Spanned volume can be extended or deleted but cannot be contained within a mirrored or striped volume. System or boot volume cannot be extended. Striped volumes cannot be extended or mirrored. They are the fastest type of volume. RAID-5 volume can only span over three or more disks.

Disk space management and monitoring on local and remote computers can be done via disk management snap-in. One can add/remove disk, change storage type from basic to dynamic and vice versa (changing from dynamic to basic loses data), import foreign disk from another computer, create different types of volumes and mount them. One has to be a member of domain administrators or server operators group to manage remote computer’s disks.