Adding a disk

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Adding a disk

Note

This topic does not apply to Windows Server® 2008, Windows Server® 2008 R2, or Windows® 7. For information on adding disks when using these operating systems, see the following:

• Overview of Disk Management
  
  
• Manage Disks
  
  
• Adding Hard Disk Drives
  
  

When you attach a new disk to your computer, you must initialize the disk before you can create volumes or partitions. When you first start Disk Management after installing a new disk, a wizard appears that provides a list of the new disks detected by the operating system. When you complete the wizard, the operating system initializes the disk(s) by writing a disk signature, the end of sector marker (also called signature word), and a master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) on the disk. If you cancel the wizard before the disk signature is written, the disk status remains Not Initialized.

You can use either basic storage or dynamic storage. Use basic storage, which uses basic volumes, if you want to create partitions and logical drives on the disk or if you want to use the disk with other operating systems. Later, you can convert basic storage to dynamic storage, which uses dynamic volumes. Dynamic volumes cannot be accessed by computers running MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows XP Home Edition that are configured to dual-boot with Windows XP Professional or Windows Server 2003 operating systems.

There are five types of dynamic volumes: simple, spanned, striped, mirrored, and RAID-5. You can create simple, spanned, or striped volumes on computers running Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP 64-bit Edition (Itanium). You can create all five types of dynamic volumes on computers running Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 operating systems. You can, however, use a computer running Windows XP Professional to remotely create mirrored and RAID-5 volumes on these operating systems.

For information about which partition style or volume type you can use on computers running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 operating systems, see Partition styles.

For information on how to initialize a new disk, see Initialize new disks.

To install a disk that is already initialized, see Update disk information.

To change the storage type for which a disk is initialized, see Change a basic disk into a dynamic disk or Change a dynamic disk back to a basic disk.