Now that you are familiar with basic and dynamic disks, you can move on to performing some basic disk management tasks such as creating, shrinking, extending and formatting simple volumes.

In Vista, you can create a new simple volume by completing the steps below:

1. Open Disk Management.
2. Right click unallocated space on the dynamic disk and click New Simple Volume.
3. Click Next.
4. Type in the size of the volume and click Next.
5. Assign a drive letter to the volume and click Next.
6. Specify the formatting options. If you choose to format the partition, type in a name for the volume in the Volume Label field and select the file system you want to use.
7. Click Next.
8. Review your selections and click Finish.

New in Vista is the ability to shrink a volume. This means you can reclaim unused space from a volume and then create a new volume from that free space.

To shrink a volume:

1. Open Disk Management.
2. Right click the volume you want to shrink and click Shrink Volume from the context menu.
3. Enter the amount in MB to shrink the partition.
4. Click Shrink.

Once the operation is complete, the free space that you reclaimed will appear as unallocated space within Disk Management.

As with XP, Vista also lets you extend a volume.

To extend a simple volume:

1. Within the Disk Management console, right click the simple volume that you want to extend and click Extend Volume.
2. Select the disk that the volume will be extended to and click Add.
3. Specify the amount of space to add to the volume. Click Next.
4. Click Finish.

In the final installment of this article, I’ll outline some of the additional disk management tasks that you can perform in Vista.

Tags: vista, basic disk, dynamic disk, windows, microsoft, partition, volume, drive