System information

2.2 System Management Functions Provided by Windows NT
Here we describe all the different management functions available provided by
NT with the appropriate menu examples and descriptions.
This part of the chapter shows examples of the built-in Windows NT systems
management and monitoring functions.
2.2.1 Windows NT Disk Administrator
The local disks are administered through the Disk Administrator. The Disk
Administrator shows you the physical and the logical configuration of the drives
and the defined partitions.
Each physical disk is shown as a bar. The defined partitions are seen as part of
the bar with different colors, depending of the type of partition.
The following functions are performed through this tool:
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Partitioning
Disk Administrator lets you create or delete primary and extended partitions.
If you define or delete partitions be aware that drive letters may change.
With Windows NT you can create only one primary partition for each physical
disk.
OS/2 Boot Manager
Do not activate an OS/2 Boot Manager partition within Windows NT. If
you have both OS/2 and NT on the same machine, NT overwrites the
Boot Manager record and you have to fix Boot Manager after you install
NT. Changing the status of the Boot Manager partition can confuse the
NT startup assignments and the system will hang during startup. To
activate the Boot Manager partition after installation, start with the OS/2
boot diskettes and execute FDISK.COM.
•
Assigning drive letters
With the Disk Administrator you can change the drive letter for each partition
individually. Every drive letter that is not in use can be assigned. A letter that
has been in use by a drive before can be reused only after reboot.
Individual drive letters can also be assigned to CD ROM drives.
•
Defining drive arrays
− Stripe set
A disk stripe is the combination of free areas on two or more physical
disks into one logical drive. The Disk Administrator will use an equal size
on every disk. The I/O load will be balanced across all used disks.
If you have three or more physical disks included for the stripe set, you
can define disk striping with parity. This provides a possibility to have a
local RAID 5 fault-tolerance system.
− Mirror set
A mirror set is a set of two identical partitions on two different disks
combined to one logical drive. Partition one will be in real time
duplicated to partition two. This lets you define a RAID 1 fault-tolerance
54 Systems Management from an NT Server Point of View