One of the important new features of Windows Server 2008 disk management is full support for GPT disks. Where is the disk number you want to convert, and where BASIC can be replaced by DYNAMIC depending on which conversion you need to do.Ĭonversions can only occur when there are no structures on the disk that are not supported in the target disk type. For those few situations in DiskPart where explicit conversion is necessary, use the following commands: DISKPART> select disk There are a few cases where the automatic conversion doesn’t happen if you’re using DiskPart.exe to manipulate the disk, but all the operations you perform in Disk Management do automatic conversions. And deleting a volume that required dynamic disks causes the disks to convert back to basic disks in most cases. Operations that require conversion to a dynamic disk will perform the conversion as part of the operation.
Unlike earlier versions of Windows Server, with Windows Server 2008 you generally have no need to directly convert a disk to a dynamic disk. If you have any existing MBR disks that include an extended partition, either because you moved a disk from another computer to your Windows Server 2008 computer or because you upgraded to Windows Server 2008 from an earlier version, we suggest you remove the existing extended partition and convert the disk to GPT. With Windows Server 2008 providing full support for GPT disks, the old limit of a maximum of four partitions on a disk is gone-GPT disks in Windows Server 2008 support 128 partitions. However, you no longer have a graphical way to create an extended partition or a logical drive, nor any real need to do so. If you have extended partitions on your disks for some reason, you can create logical drives on the partition using DiskPart.exe. Creating Extended Partitions and Logical Drives Unfortunately, mounted volumes are not handled correctly by Network File System (NFS) shares and should be avoided in environments where Server for NFS is used. You can use mounted volumes to provide a mix of redundant and nonredundant storage in a logical structure that meets the business needs of the enterprise while hiding the complexities of the physical structure from the users. The properties of a drive do not show all the available disk space for that drive, because they do not reflect any volumes mounted on the drive. (But really, it’s time to let go of FAT as a file system for hard disks!) You can mount only a single volume at a given mount point, but you can then mount further volumes on top of an existing mounted volume, with the same rules and restrictions as any other mount. You can, however, mount a FAT or FAT32 volume at any mount point. FAT and FAT32 drives do not support mounted volumes. A mounted volume can also have a drive letter associated with it-although it does not need to-and it can be mounted at more than one point, giving multiple entry points into the same storage.Ī volume must be mounted on an empty subfolder of an existing NTFS volume or drive. These files are hosted at Gist.Github if you want to use them or contribute changes.Windows Server 2008 borrows a concept from the UNIX world by adding the ability to mount a volume or partition on a subfolder of an existing drive letter. Or unmount the same VHD: C:\> UnMountVHD.cmd This way, you can simply run MountVHD.cmd and point it to your VHD: C:\> MountVHD.cmd I’ve created two simple scripts, MountVHD.cmd and UnmountVHD.cmd that create a “diskpart script”, run it, then remove the temporary file. The script is simply the command you would have typed in above: C:\> diskpart /s Luckily, diskpart takes a single parameter, /s, which specifies a diskpart “script”. These commands work fine on an ad-hoc basis, but I had the need to automate loading a VHD from a script. Unmounting is just as simple: C:\> diskpart
While you can mount VHDs from the Windows 7 diskmgmt.msc GUI, or via vhdmount, if you need support for mounting or unmounting VHDs from the command-line on a vanilla Windows 7 / Server 2008 install, you have to use diskpart.ĭiskpart’s mount commands are pretty simple: C:\> diskpartĭISKPART> sel vdisk file="" VHDs are great for virtual machines, native VHD booting into recent Windows OSs, or even moving whole file systems around. Windows 7 has native support for VHDs (virtual hard disks) built into the OS.