CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)  9  Chapter 1: What are Operating Systems and How Do They Work?       9  System Configuration Tools

Viewing Members of a Group 1 Services

Potentially one of the most dangerous snap-ins, Disk Management is the central location from which disk partitioning and availability is managed. In Windows NT, it is accessed by running “Disk Administrator” from Administrative Tools.

Disk Management provides an “operating system level” overview of disks installed in the local machine. The phrase “operating system level” is important as the view from Explorer (for example, My Computer) does not always represent the actual disk configuration within the computer. Consider a software mirrored disk set – only one logical drive will appear in My Computer, but Disk Management will display the two disks that make up the mirror set.

Disk formatting, partitioning and management are an entire topic alone, and cross over to the A+ Hardware objectives. It is essential to understand both the hardware-level and operating system-level disk management concepts as they greatly affect the configuration of a system. For example, two hard drives configured as hardware RAID-1 (mirrored) will appear as a single hard drive to the operating system.

Viewing Members of a Group 1 Services