Exam 70-290 Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment will test your knowledge and ability to manage basic and dynamic disks. Since the new exams now include simulations, one of the best ways to prepare is the practice converting from basic to dynamic, creating and extending volumes and so on. Your first step in preparing for this sub-objective should be to understand the differences between basic and dynamic disks.

Basic disks are supported by all versions of Windows including MS-DOS and Windows NT. A basic disk supports the following:

• Primary partitions

• Extended partitions
• Logical drives

A basic disk also supports different types of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) including volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets, and stripe sets with parity.

Dynamic disks were introduced in Windows 2000 and they are not supported by any earlier versions of Windows. A dynamic disk supports the following:

• Simple volumes

• Spanned volumes
• Mirrored volumes
• Striped volumes
• RAID-5 volumes

A disk can be upgraded from basic to dynamic using the Disk Management console. Click Start and click Control Panel. Double click Administrative Tools and open the Computer Management applet. Click Disk Management. Right click the disk and click Convert to Dynamic Disk.

A few things you need to keep in mind about upgrading to a dynamic disk. First of all, this is a one way upgrade. In order to revert back to a basic disk, you must back up all your data, delete the existing volumes and repartition the disk. Next, you can not upgrade to a dynamic disk of you are using a mobile computer. Finally, dynamic disks are not accessible under pre-Windows 2000 operating systems. If you are dual booting with an older version of Windows, the dynamic disk will not be readable. In the next installment of this article, you’ll more closely at converting from a basic to dynamic disk.