Disk Management Availability

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Disk Management

Everything you need to know about Disk Management in


Windows
Disk Management is an extension of the Microsoft Management Console that allows full
management of the disk-based hardware recognized by Windows. 

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.

Note:
-Disk Management is sometimes spelling incorrectly as Disc Management. Also, even though
they might sound similar, Disk Management is not the same as Device Manager.

Disk Management Availability


Disk Management is available in most versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows
10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000.

Note:

Even though Disk Management is available in multiple Windows operating systems, some small
differences in the utility do exist from one Windows version to the next.

How to Open Disk Management


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

The panes and menus you see in Disk Management are customizable, so if you've ever
changed the settings, the above might not be exactly how the program looks to you. For
example, you can change the top pane to be the graphical representation and disable
the bottom pane entirely. Use the View menu to change where the panes are displayed
in Disk Management.

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:

 Partition a drive
 Format a drive
 Change a drive's letter
 Shrink a partition
 Extend a partition
 Delete a partition
 Change a drive's file system

More Information on Disk Management


-The Disk Management tool has a graphical interface like a regular program and is
similar in function to the command line utility diskpart, which was a replacement of an
earlier utility called fdisk.

You can also use Disk Management to check free hard drive space. Look under
the Capacity and Free Space columns (in the Disk List or Volume List view) to see the
total storage capacity of all the disks as well as how much free space is remaining, which
is expressed in units (i.e. MB and GB) as well as a percentage.

Disk Management is where you can create and attach virtual hard disk files in Windows
10 and Windows 8. These are single files that act as hard drives, which means you can
store them on your main hard drive or in other places like external hard drives.

To build a virtual disk file with the VHD or VHDX file extension, use the Action > Create
VHD menu. Opening one is done through the Attach VHD option.

The View menu is how you can change which panes you see at the top and bottom of
Disk Management. It's also where you go to change the colors and patterns Disk
Management uses to display unallocated space, free space, logical drives, spanned
volumes, RAID-5 volumes, and other disk regions.

Alternatives to Disk Management


Some free disk partitioning tools let you perform most of the same tasks supported in
Disk Management but without even needing to open Microsoft's tool at all. Plus, some of
them are even easier to use than Disk Management. 

MiniTool Partition Wizard Free, for instance, lets you make a bunch of changes to your
disks to see how they'll affect the sizes, etc., and then you can apply all the changes at
once after you're satisfied.

One thing you can do with that program is wipe a partition or whole disk clean with DoD
5220.22-M, which is a data sanitization method not supported with Disk Management.

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