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Instead of having a single drive on which the operating system has to coexist with all additional data, Vista will allow you to break up the cohabitation into smaller storage areas, as the predecessor versions of the Windows operating system did. If you are already familiar with the disk management capabilities of XP, you will notice that Vista brings to the table a few improvements.

It is always a healthy technique to reserve an entire volume just for Windows Vista. In the first set of screenshots below you will be able to see that I have started with a clean installation of Windows Vista Enterprise. The operating system was installed without partitioning the space available of the hard drive in any manner. Click on the thumbnails to access larger versions of the images. There is just one hard disk and a single partition. Now, didn't I say this was unhealthy? Well yes, but such a basic setting allows me to demonstrate the advanced disk and drive management features built in Windows Vista. And of course that there are third party products designed especially for such tasks, but Vista has plenty to offer and users get access to a great deal of capabilities that ship by default with the platform.



Please do bear in mind that this is only a demonstration. You can manage your hard drives in accordance to your needs and preferences. You might just be the adept of keeping the operating system and all your personal data on a single volume. Frequent backups saved on external storage might just do the trick for you. But then you'll be missing out on giving the Vista disk management resources a try. And this is why I will cover the Disk Management tool and DISKPART (but only a tad).

Are You Calling Me FAT? Well, Are You? I Thought So!

Before getting down to FAT32 vs. NTFS, I thought I would joggle with some of the terminology associated with managing the hard disk drives in Windows Vista, especially Formatting and File System, just because the two concepts are interconnected. Formatting a disk via the Format command is a process designed to get the physical device ready for storage in relation to either the FAT32 or NTFS file systems. FAT (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (NT File System) along with CDFS (Compact Disc File System) and UDF (Universal Disk Format) are the file systems supported in Vista. And file systems provide a method for organizing the contents, either files or folder, stored on a particular disk.

So which one will it be? FAT32 or NTFS? Surprisingly enough, even in the context of Windows Vista, there are users that still oscillate between the two. Vista does point in the right direction. The latest operating system from Microsoft will only install by default on a NTFS partition. FAT32 just doesn't bode well with Vista. I recommend using NTFS for all formatting involving Windows Vista on your local hard drives. Of course that if you are still running Windows 98 for example then you should also turn back in time to FAT32. But it is not right to consider FAT32 obsolete, while it is the file system of choice for USB flash disks, mainly because of issues involving backward compatibility, even though FAT dates back to the late 1970s and was related to the MS-DOS operating system.

FAT of course grew to FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32, an evolution that marked the parallel increase in bits, before Microsoft introduced NTFS concomitantly with Windows NT. But when it comes down to FAT32 vs. NTFS, the truth is that the first comes with inherent limitations, the first of which are related to scalability. Starting with Windows 2000, the Redmond company limited the size of volumes formatted via FAT32 to just 32 GB, while the actual restriction involves 2 terabytes. FAT32 also comes with issues of support for alternate data streams in transfer scenarios with the source formatted as NTFS or UDF. Additionally, considering the fact that the maximum size of a file on FAT32 cannot go higher than, well... 32-bits, a partition formatted with this file system will not store files over 4 GB. And to top it all off, FAT32 comes with no data recovery capabilities and because of the lack of clustering it suffers a continuous degradation in performance.

So the obvious choice is NTFS. When formatting your hard disk this is the only option you should consider. While NTFS is superior to FAT32, there are better solutions for a file system available and one of them, Sun Microsystems' Zettabyte File System will be integrated into Mac OS X Leopard in October 2007. But in Vista we simply have to work with what we've got. As a journaling file system, NTFS does come with recoverability, based on the transaction model of handling metadata. Moreover the file system provides users with security features such as restrictive access, optimized disk space utilization, managing volumes greater than 8 GM more efficiently than FAT32, increased speed and extends the maximum file size to 256 terabytes.

As previous versions of Windows, Vista also allows users to convert a FAT32 disk or partition to NTFS via the command-line Convert utility. All you have to do is enter "cmd" in the Search Box under the Start Menu and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter in order to launch command prompt with elevated privileges. Then simply type "convert e: /fs:ntfs" where "e:" is the actual partition you want to convert from FAT32 to NTFS. You have to keep in mind the fact that the conversion process requires the drive not to be in use. Otherwise you can schedule the task for the next time Vista reboots.

It's Right About Time You'd Get Your Hands Dirty...

The Disk Management tool and the Diskpart Command-Line Utility are the two ways you can manage Vista's resources. In order to access Diskpart open a command prompt window with elevated privileges. And that's it, you are set. However, the utility is only designed for the most advanced users. The minute you use the old "/?" after DISKPART in the command prompt window you will understand why. But since all the tasks that you can perform via Diskpart can be replicated with the Disk Management tool, with some exceptions, I will focus on the latter. Still, if you want to master disk management via the command prompt then Microsoft has set up "A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility" to address just such cases.

So we are left with Disk Management. You can execute the tool by entering "diskmgmt.msc" in the Search box under the Start menu, or in a Run dialog. Right clicking on Computer will bring up a contextual menu and the Manage option will open the Computer Management window centralizing such system and storage tools as Task Scheduler, Event Viewer, Device Manager and of course Disk Management, along with additional options. And last, you can always navigate your way via Start Menu, Control Panel, System and Maintenance, Administrative Tools and then Create And Format Hard Disk Partitions. Just stick with the first variant...