We were using drive letters before DOS, and I'm surprised we're still. How to Create a Bootable Windows 7 or Vista USB Drive. Need to install Windows 7 on a computer with no drive? Do you want to create a backup installer in case your. Tools to scan, monitor or repair hard drives (HDD). This little tool will set the dirty bit flag on a drive. When the dirty bit flag is set, Windows will perform a. By Dan Gookin. The art of repartitioning involves several steps in Windows. The drive must first be shrunk. Windows uses any free space on the drive to create a new. Run the Windows disk management in Windows 8.1, for. If you connected a USB drive and Windows doesn’t show up in the file manager, you should first check the Disk Management window. To open Disk Management on Windows. Create New, Resize, Extend Partition using Disk Management Tool in Windows 10/8/7. How to Find Your Missing USB Drive in Windows 7, 8, and 1. USB drives should automatically appear in Windows Explorer when you connect them to your computer. Follow these troubleshooting steps if Windows doesn’t show a connected drive. Diagnosing the Problem. If you connected a USB drive and Windows doesn’t show up in the file manager, you should first check the Disk Management window. To open Disk Management on Windows 8 or 1. Start button and select “Disk Management”. On Windows 7, press Windows+R to open the Run dialog, type diskmgmt. Enter. Examine the list of disks in the disk management window and look for your external drive. Even if it doesn’t show up in Windows Explorer, it should appear here. Look for a disk that matches the size of your flash drive. Sometimes, it’ll also be marked as “Removable”, but not always. In the screenshot below, we’ve spotted our removable drive at “Disk 3”. If you see yours, move onto the next section. If you don’t see the drive in the Disk Management window at all, try these troubleshooting steps: Power On the Drive, if Necessary: Some external hard drives have their own power switches or separate power cables. If you’re using a larger drive, ensure it doesn’t have its own power switch or power cable you need to connect. Plug It Into a Different USB Port: Try unplugging the external drive and plugging it into a different USB port on your computer. It’s possible that one particular USB port on the computer is dead. Avoid USB Hubs: If you’re plugging the USB drive into a USB hub, try plugging it directly into one of your computer’s USB ports instead. It’s possible the USB hub doesn’t supply enough power. Try a Different Computer: Try plugging the USB drive into a different computer and see if the other computer detects it. If no computers see the drive when you connect it–even in the Disk Management window–the USB drive itself is likely dead. ![]() ![]() Hopefully, one of these will solve your problem. If not, move onto the fixes outlined below. Fixing the Problem. Once you’ve performed the above steps, you’re in a better place to fix the problem. Here are a few possible solutions based on what you found when searching for the drive in Disk Management. If Windows Asks You to Format the Partition When You Insert It. If Windows can see the drive but can’t read it, it’s possible the drive was formatted with a file system Windows doesn’t normally support. For example, this can occur if you format a drive with the HFS+ file system on a Mac or with the ext. Linux PC. If you connect a drive with a foreign file system, Windows will tell you it needs format the drive before it can use it. Don’t format the disk yet! This will erase any files on the disk. If you don’t need the files on the disk, you can agree to format it–but be sure the drive doesn’t have any important files on it before you do. To read a drive like this one, you can either connect it to the Mac or Linux PC it was made on, and copy your files off of it onto another drive. Alternatively, you can use software that lets you read Mac or Linux file systems in Windows. After you copy the files off the drive, you can agree to let Windows format (erase) the disk. It will appear as an empty drive that is now compatible with Windows. If Other Windows PCs Can See the Drive, But Your Current One Can’t. If other computers detect the drive when you plug it in, but your current computer doesn’t, it’s possible there’s a driver problem in Windows. To check for this, open the Device Manager. On Windows 8 or 1. Start button and select “Device Manager”. On Windows 7, press Windows+R, type devmgmt. Run dialog, and press Enter. Expand the “Disk Drives” and “USB Serial Bus controllers” sections and look for any devices with a yellow exclamation mark on their icon. If you see a device with an error icon, right- click it and select “Properties”. You’ll see an error message with more information. Search the web for this error message to find more information. To fix driver problems, you may want to right- click the device, choose Properties, and head to the Driver tab. Use the “Update Driver” button to attempt to install an updated driver, click “Roll Back Driver” to roll back the driver to a previous one if it just stopped working, or use the “Uninstall” button to uninstall the driver and hope Windows automatically reinstalls one that will work. If You See the Drive in Disk Management, and It Has Partitions. If the drive appears in Disk Management and you see one or more partitions on the drive–with a blue bar along the top–it may not be appearing in Windows Explorer because it needs to be assigned drive letters. To do this, right- click the partition on the drive in Disk Management and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths”. If you can’t click “Change Drive Letter and Paths”, that’s because Windows doesn’t support the file system on the partition–see below for more information. You may see that the partition has no drive letter assigned to it. Assign a driver letter and it should just work. To assign a drive letter, click the “Add” button and assign a drive letter of your choice to the drive. Click “OK’ and it will appear in File Explorer or Windows Explorer with that drive letter. If You See the Drive in Disk Management, But It’s Empty. If you see the drive in Disk Management, but it’s “Unallocated”, with a black bar along the top, this means that the drive is completely empty and unformatted. To format it, so Windows can use it, just right- click the unallocated space in Disk Management and select “New Simple Volume”. Choose the maximum possible size for the partition and assign a drive letter–you can let Windows automatically choose a drive letter. If you want the drive to be compatible with as many other operating system and devices as possible, format it with the ex. FAT file system when Windows asks. Otherwise, if you’re only using it on Windows machines, NTFS is fine. After it’s done, the drive should be usable. If You See the Drive in Disk Management, But You Can’t Format It. In some cases, the drive may have a very messy partition scheme. You may even see “protected” partitions that you can’t delete from within Disk Management. Or, the partition on the drive may be too small because the drive has protected partitions wasting space on it. You can “clean” the drive to clean up that mess, wiping all the files and partition information from the drive and making it usable once more. First, back up any important data on the drive if the drive has important data on it. The cleaning process will wipe the drive. To clean the drive, you’ll need to open a Command Prompt window as Administrator and use the diskpart command to “clean” the appropriate drive. Follow our step- by- step instructions to cleaning a drive in Windows for more information. You can then create partitions on the empty drive. With any luck, after following these steps, your drive will be in good working condition again. Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Management. In today’s edition of Geek School, we’re going to talk about how to use Disk Management. There’s a list of your hard drives combined with a graphical representation of the partitions on each one. You can create and edit partitions. You can create Spanned, Striped, or Mirrored volumes across multiple disks, or you can create and attach virtual hard drives. If you dig a little deeper, you will find that you can switch your hard drives between MBR (Master Boot Record) and GPT (Guid Partition Table) as the partition scheme, and then you can specify whether to use Basic (the default) partitions, or to use “Dynamic”, which is a special method to allow Windows to handle the partitioning. Confused? Keep reading and we’ll try to explain it in a way that everybody can understand. Understanding the Interface. When you first launch Disk Management (which can be done through right- clicking on the Start button in Windows 8. Computer icon in Windows 7 and selecting “Manage”), you’ll be presented with a two- pane interface. The list of volumes is on top, and the list of physical drives is on the bottom. The bottom panel shows not just the list of physical drives, but a graphical representation of the partitions, or volumes, on each drive, including a bunch of useful information. In the screenshot above, you’ll notice that the drives have extra information displayed – you can see that the C: drive is the Boot drive, while the System Reserved partition is the Active one. Both partitions are Primary. That System Reserved partition actually contains the boot files, so the BIOS for the computer initially boots from that partition, and then Windows loads through the C: partition. If you either select a drive or a partition and use the Action menu, you’ll see a list of most of the options, including how to create a spanned, striped, or mirrored volume, and how to switch between MBR / GPT disk type, or Basic / Dynamic. We’ll explain that stuff shortly. If you right- click on a partition, you’ll see a different list of actions – you can change the drive letter or path for a drive (more on that later), or you can shrink / extend the volume, format it, add a mirror, or delete it. We’ll mention this again later, but it’s worth noting right away: Software RAID, as in mirroring, striping, or spanning, is not something you want to do if you have a choice. It’s always better to go with hardware RAID instead. It’s important to understand partitioning though. Initializing a Disk and Choosing a Partition Style. Have you ever inserted a drive into your PC only to be presented with a dialog asking you to Initialize Disk? What’s actually going on is that Windows didn’t detect any partition table format, so it will ask you to “Initialize”, which really just means write out a new blank partition table. In modern versions of Windows, that means you’ll get a choice between MBR and GPT. Note: just because Windows didn’t recognize any partition information doesn’t mean that your drive is blank. If you know that the drive works, it’s possible that you are having a driver issue, or in some cases, if you plugged in an external drive, you can remove and then plug it back in again. Of course, if you selected GPT as the partition table, it’s also possible that the PC’s BIOS can’t handle it. Using MBR (Master Boot Record)If you are formatting a drive that you plan to plug into different computers, it would generally need to use the MBR partition “style” because it’s a really old format that works everywhere, because any computer with a regular BIOS has support for hard drives partitioned using MBR. Modern computers using UEFI are going away from MBR support and switching instead to the newer and better replacement known as GPT (Guid Partition Table), because MBR has a number of issues and limitations. One of these limitations is that MBR only supports up to 4 primary partitions. If you want to use more than 4 partitions, you need to set the fourth partition as an “Extended” primary partition, which can then house “Logical” partitions within it. Thankfully all of this happens behind the scenes in Disk Management these days, but from a technology standpoint, it isn’t the best way to handle things, and has some weird compatibility issues. Notice the logical partitions in brighter blue, while the extended partition is green. The next limitation is that partitions using the MBR format have a maximum size of 2 Ti. B, which is significantly less than what you can get from modern hard drives, and especially from what you can do with a hardware RAID using a couple of 2 or 3 TB hard drives. This limitation stems from the fact that there is a 3. So 5. 12 * 2^3. 2 = 2 Ti. B, and thus you’ll always read that MBR partitions have that limit. The good news is that there is a workaround should you need one. If you have one of the newer hard drives that use 4k sectors, the actual theoretical limit is 1. Ti. B instead, since 4. Ti. B. Realistically, however, it would be better to just migrate to GPT partitions instead, which have no such limitations. Using GPT (Guid Partition Table)The newer GPT partition table “style” is required on your boot drive by newer computers that use UEFI instead of BIOS – while some of them support a “legacy BIOS” mode to handle booting the older style, you would generally just use GPT instead. Since Windows Vista, you can generally use GPT partitions on a data drive for a computer that uses a newer version of BIOS, but you can’t use them as a bootable drive. And 3. 2- bit Windows XP doesn’t support it from all the documentation we’ve ever read. None of that “Extended” or “Logical” partition nonsense on a GPT drive. GPT supports up to 1. Rather than just storing a single copy of the partition table the way MBR does, there is both a primary and backup copy, and they have cyclic redundancy checks to validate against data corruption. All GPT disks contain a “Protective MBR” at the beginning of the drive, which is basically a fake MBR at the beginning of the drive where an old- school MBR drive would put it. This protects you against older tools breaking your drive because they don’t have GPT support. It does not, however, make the file system readable on older computers. Bootable GPT drives require a couple of things. First, you’ll need an EFI System Partition, which is at least 1. MB depending on your drive, and that partition will contain the boot loader and other information. To better understand the difference between MBR and GPT, we found this graphic buried deep within the Microsoft documentation and decided to display it here for you as well. Notice the LDM data partition stuff, which we are going to cover in a moment. You can actually switch back and forth between MBR and GPT partition types by right- clicking on the drive in Disk Management. The problem is that before you do, you’ll need to delete all of the partitions on the disk, which does make the feature slightly less useful. Choosing a Disk Type: Basic or Dynamic. One of the other concepts in Disk Management is the very confusing “Dynamic” disk instead of the default “Basic” disk. What makes this more confusing is that you can also choose between MBR and GPT Disk on the same menu. When you create a disk using either MBR or GPT partition formatting, you can create regular partitions using the MBR or GPT specification. For MBR that would be a choice between the Primary and Extended / Logical partitions, and for GPT it would just be regular Guid partitions. Windows refers to this as a “Basic” disk. The other option in Windows is to use a “Dynamic Disk”, which allows Windows to take control of your partitioning rather than using the partitioning specifications. These are called Volumes rather than partitions (in fact, Windows always refers to either type of partition as a volume). What happens behind the scenes is that Windows creates a regular MBR or GPT partition structure that fills the entire drive, and then Windows will allow you to manage the “Volumes” on that drive, which act like partitions, and even provide extra features. Because Dynamic Disks are still reliant on the underlying MBR or GPT structure, you should choose between them wisely – if you need a huge drive, GPT is probably the way to go. Windows uses the Logical Disk Manager (LDM) database to store the volume types, drive letters, and all of the other information, and it even replicates this database to every dynamic drive on your computer for backup. On an MBR drive, this data is stored in the last 1 MB on the drive, and in a GPT drive, Windows will create a 1 MB hidden partition called the LDM metadata partition. Mirroring Your System Drive. You can easily convert your system drive to a dynamic disk in order to mirror it. All you have to do is start the mirroring wizard by right- clicking on your system drive and choosing Add Mirror. You will be prompted to convert the disks to dynamic instead of Basic, and given a warning that you can’t boot any other operating systems. That’s right, dynamic disks break dual- booting scenarios. Once you’ve configured the mirror, your computer will slow down to a crawl as all of the data from your system drive is copied over to the other drive. From that moment on, your data should stay in sync on both drives. You can right- click on the mirrored drives to either “break” the mirror, which will stop mirroring but leave everything alone on each drive, or you can remove the mirror. Note: You can’t mirror an MBR drive to a GPT drive. Types of Volumes for Dynamic Disks. When you are working with a volume on a Dynamic Disk, you can choose to extend or span that volume across multiple drives, you can stripe or mirror, or in server editions you can even use RAID 5. There’s also not a real limit on the number of volumes you can have, although it wouldn’t make sense to have a huge number of them. Here are the types of volumes you can create on a Dynamic Disk: Simple Volume – this is a regular “partition”.
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