Disk Management

Disk Management is a utility built into different operating systems which can be used to create, delete, format partitions, assign drive letters, and much more. Disk Management can also be used to view partitions and their formatted file systems on the hard drive
Disk Management is used to manage the drives installed in a computer—like hard disk drives (internal and external), optical disk drives, and flash drives.
Disk Management is used to manage the drives installed in a computer—like hard disk drives (internal and external), optical disk drives, and flash drives. It can be used to partition drives, format drives, assign drive letters, and much more.

How to Open Disk Management

The most common way to access Disk Management is via the Computer Management utility.

Disk Management can also be started by executing diskmgmt.msc via the Command Prompt or another command-line interface in Windows.

How to Use Disk Management

Disk Management has two main sections—a top and a bottom:
  • The top section of Disk Management contains a list of all the partitions, formatted or not, that Windows recognizes.
  • The bottom section of Disk Management contains a graphical representation of the physical drives installed in the computer.
Performing certain actions on the drives or partitions make them available or unavailable to Windows and configure them to be used by Windows in certain ways.
Here are some common things that you can do in Disk Management:
The operating system is responsible for several aspects of disk management.
Disk Formatting
A new magnetic disk is a blank slate. It is just platters of a magnetic recording material. Before a disk can store data, it must be divided into sectors that the disk controller can read and write. This process is called low-level formatting (or physical formatting).
Low-level formatting fills the disk with a special data structure for each sector. The data structure for a sector consists of a header, a data area, and a trailer. The header and trailer contain information used by the disk controller, such as a sector number and an error-correcting code (ECC).
To use a disk to hold files, the operating system still needs to record its own data structures on the disk. It does so in two steps. The first step is to partition the disk into one or more groups of cylinders. The operating system can treat each partition as though it were a separate disk. For instance, one partition can hold a copy of the operating system’s executable code, while another holds user files. After partitioning, the second step is logical formatting (or creation of a file system). In this step, the operating system stores the initial file-system data structures onto the disk.
Boot Block
When a computer is powered up or rebooted, it needs to have an initial program to run. This initial program is called the bootstrap program. It initializes all aspects of the system (i.e. from CPU registers to device controllers and the contents of main memory) and then starts the operating system.
To do its job, the bootstrap program finds the operating system kernel on disk, loads that kernel into memory, and jumps to an initial address to begin the operating-system execution.
For most computers, the bootstrap is stored in read-only memory (ROM). This location is convenient because ROM needs no initialization and is at a fixed location that the processor can start executing when powered up or reset. And since ROM is read-only, it cannot be infected by a computer virus. The problem is that changing this bootstrap code requires changing the ROM hardware chips.
For this reason, most systems store a tiny bootstrap loader program in the boot ROM, whose only job is to bring in a full bootstrap program from disk. The full bootstrap program can be changed easily: A new version is simply written onto the disk. The full bootstrap program is stored in a partition (at a fixed location on the disk) is called the boot blocks. A disk that has a boot partition is called a boot disk or system disk.
Bad Blocks
Since disks have moving parts and small tolerances, they are prone to failure. Sometimes the failure is complete, and the disk needs to be replaced, and its contents restored from backup media to the new disk.
More frequently, one or more sectors become defective. Most disks even come from the factory with bad blocks. Depending on the disk and controller in use, these blocks are handled in a variety of ways.
The controller maintains a list of bad blocks on the disk. The list is initialized during the low-level format at the factory and is updated over the life of the disk. The controller can be told to replace each bad sector logically with one of the spare sectors. This scheme is known as sector sparing or forwarding.

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