How to use Diskpart as Hard Disk Manager on command line

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The tool diskpart.exe is a powerful tool for managing partitions on hard drives that can be used in Microsoft's Windows operating systems. It is possible to create volumes, and also perform the formatting and conversion. The disk management can be under operating systems such as Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 easily done with Disk Management. But there are several cases in which the graphical management tool not help further. For example, let hard disks with partitions, the operating systems were created by other, often not clear under Windows. Such a drive has a 200 MB installed MacOS with large protected EFI partition, which can not remove the Disk Manager of Windows.

In addition, there is the Windows Server 2008/R2 but also the core server that requires no graphical interface. And at least there are tools like diskpart.exe imperative to administration functions from the command line instead of the graphical interface to perform the. The Windows built-in tool also allows the deletion of other partitions, for which Disk Management fails.

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About Diskpart

The powerful tools have the attraction that they are suitable for experienced administrators to automate repetitive tasks. Sun diskpart.exe can also run scripts from. This can, for example, make sense for the reviewing process. Diskpart.exe is, as the name suggests, a tool for partitioning hard drives. There are also advanced features such as the configuration of SAN policies and formatting disks. Unlike many other recent command-line tools in Windows environment, there are diskpart.exe only two modes:

• Commands can be executed as scripts. This is the /s, followed by the name of the script used.
• With diskpart can have its own command line to start, in which can then enter the commands.

By contrast there is no way, commands such as the shape diskpart file system directly from the command prompt run. This mode is - in contrast to applications such as netsh - not supported.

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The most important commands

The main command for diskpart.exe certainly help. It displays the available commands. In the Command can help shape the details appear to be a command to. Active Sun shows such as the syntax help for the command to active, with the currently selected disk partition as active partition can be marked on one basis. A first important command list. List disk with a list of physical drives are displayed. For all other variants are required then select the commands. With select disk 0 can, for example, the first hard drive to choose to list with the partition list to view the partitions. With select partition 1 connection can be selected in the first partition. List volume then shows the defined drives.


Disk information in detail

File system is another interesting command, because his current file system on the selected volume's can do this with is that you choose must select before with volume, however. Moreover, the supported file systems are displayed for this volume with all possible cluster sizes. Also interesting is the command in detail that shows its variants detail disk, partition and detail detail volume. Details about this can be the currently selected hard disks, partitions and volumes.

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Partitioning and mirroring

But there are more possibilities. With create partitions and volumes, it can be created easily. There are two variants:

• Create partition create a partition. The type of partition can be set via parameters. Create partition primary example creates a primary partition, and create partition extended extended partition created. About the size parameters, the size of a partition can be specified. Alternatively, one can but a blank hard disk and only one partition, and then use the shrink command zoom out.
• Create volume is used for the production of disk drives. Here, the support of simple volumes, stripe and RAID-5 volume is supported.

To carry out a reflection on the other hand, one must first create a simple volume. The command can then add another hard drive will be selected on a volume is created for mirroring. On the second hard disk, it must logically enough free disk space for this activity. The command can break reflections of data carriers to be broken again. In RAID volumes, however, is particularly interesting repair,-5 volume with a failed RAID member back to repair. Almost all of these commands, there are additional parameters that you mentioned above help-commands, the query on.

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Formatting and conversion

Interesting are also the possibilities to format a file system and to convert the format of the file systems. With the format command format can be one. It can be set at all available parameters. Examples include

• the type of the file system where the version can be selected, if different versions of a file system can be configured
• the name (label) of the volume
• the activation of the compression of a disk.

With the conversion, however, base disk will be converted to dynamic disks, and vice versa. Also worth mentioning are three more commands:

• active: The selected partition as active partition assignment may be marked with this, what boot processes of the system is important for.
• attribute volume: This statement can be different attributes of volumes to be modified. Details about the customizable attributes help deliver the statement attribute volume.
• attribute disk: Similarly, can use this command to the attributes of hard disks to adapt.

Diskpart.exe is one of the equally powerful as - for the complexity of the supported functions - useful tools from the command line. And as detailed above, there are always more situations where you need this tool.