DIT314 ~ Client Operating System & Administration CHAPTER 7 MANAGING DISKS AND FILE SYSTEM Prepared By : Suraya Alias

7.1Introducing Disk Management There are 2 types of hard disks storage supported by windows XP 1. Basic hard disk 2. Dynamic hard disk 7.1.1What is Basic Disk? Traditional type of disk storage Uses normal partition table supported by Windows XP and others There are 3 types of partitions in basic disk; 1.Primary Partition It can be configured up to four primary partition It can be configured as bootable drive 2.Extended Partition More than four partition can be configured Cannot be formatted with any file system 3.Logical partition Can be created inside an extended partition It is used for organizing files The list of tasks that can be done in the basic disk are; 1. Create and delete primary and extended partition 2. Create and delete logical drives within an extended partition 3. Format a partition and mark it as active 4. Delete volume, striped, mirror or stripe sets with parity

7.1Introducing Disk Management 7.1.2What is Dynamic Disk? Physical disk that provides features that basic disks don’t Example ; it supports volumes for spanning multiple disks There are 5 types of dynamic disk volumes 1. Simple volume 2. Spanned volume 3. Striped volume 4. Mirrored volume 5. RAID-5 volume Advantage over Basic disks You can divide the disks into many volumes The configuration information about the dynamic disks is stored in the disk itself, so each disk has a copy

7.1Introducing Disk Management 7.1.3Converting to Basic and Dynamic Disk Once you convert a basic disk to dynamic, you cannot undo it Advantage : Windows allows you to span a single volume across multiple dynamic disks Not every disks can be converted; for example removable disks, zip drives cannot be converted to dynamic disks. WHY? Because the volume from the removable disk will be broken if we remove it from the system !

7.2Maintaining Disk Drive 7.2.1Defragmenting a disk volume Is a process of finding and consolidating fragmented files and folders by moving them to one location on the hard disk. It is done using Disk Defragmenter During this process, the files or folders in our pc is rearranged accordingly. So, it reduces the time for the OS to access the files and folders (becomes more efficient) Checking disk Is a process/attempt to repair the file system errors, to locate bad sectors and recover readable information from the bad sectors. It is done using Check Disk tool Disk Cleanup It helps to free up space on your hard drive Can perform some of this task Remove temp internet files Remove windows temp files Remove installed program Empty recycle bin Remove downloaded program files

7.3Introducing File System File system is a method for storing and organizing computer files You can choose between 3 file systems for disk partitions on XP NTFS, FAT, FAT Comparison FAT, FAT32 and NTFS a)Compatibility of each file system with various operating system NTFSFATFAT32 Windows XP, 2000 can access files on an NTFS partition Windows NT 4.0 (service pack 4 or later) MS-DOS, all Windows version, Windows NT, 2000, XP and OS/2 can access Windows 95 OSR2, 98, ME, 2000, XP

7.3Introducing File System 7.3.1Comparison FAT, FAT32 and NTFS b)Comparison of disk and file sizes NTFSFATFAT32 Min volume size 10 Megabytes Volumes can be larger than 2 Terabytes Cannot be used on floppy disks File size limited only by size of volume Volumes from floppy disk size up to 4 gigabytes Does not support domains Max file size is 2 gigabytes Volumes from 512MB to 2 TB Can be formatted up to 32 GB only Does not support domains Max file size is 4 gigabytes

7.3Introducing File System 7.3.3The strength of NTFS File System More powerful Easy to convert partitions to NTFS Maintain the access control NTFS file system works best with large disks 7.3.4Converting to FAT32 and NTFS Can be done by using built in utility in XP (it is a one way process) Improvement of NTFS over FAT32 Second copy of boot sector for improved reliability Compression File permission Improved recoverability Improved performance on large volumes Improved efficiency n disk space utilization Improved fault tolerance

7.4Introducing Encrypting File System (EFS) Is a process of converting data into a format that cannot be used by user EFS provides the core file encryption technology for NTFS volume used to store encrypted files on NTFS file system volumes FEATURES; User can encrypt their files when storing them on disk Accessing encrypted files is fast and easy Encryption of data is accomplished automatically Data can be decrypted by clearing the Encryption check box Admin can recover back the encrypted data REMEMBER; Only files and folders on NTFS volumes can be encrypted Compressed files and folders cannot be encrypted Encrypted files can be become decrypted if you move or copy the files to a non NTFS volume If you move unencrypted file to an encrypted folder, the files will be encrypted. The reverse operation is not automatic.