Overview of Disk Management

Applies To: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2

Disk Management is a system utility for managing hard disks and the volumes or partitions that they contain. With Disk Management, you can initialize disks, create volumes, and format volumes with the FAT, FAT32, or NTFS file systems. Disk Management enables you to perform most disk-related tasks without restarting the system or interrupting users. Most configuration changes take effect immediately.

In this version of Windows, Disk Management provides the same features you may already be familiar with from earlier versions, but also adds some new features:

  • Simpler partition creation. When you right-click a volume, you can choose whether to create a basic, spanned, or striped partition directly from the menu. See Create and format a hard disk partition.

  • Disk conversion options . When you add more than four partitions to a basic disk, you are prompted to convert the disk to dynamic or to the GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

  • Extend and shrink partitions. You can extend and shrink partitions directly from the Windows interface. See Can I repartition my hard disk?.

Additional resources