Question on disk management in vista

[ingeborgdot]

I have an external hard drive that will be used for backup. I am not used to the vista management and have a question. In the little box on the left it says Disk 5 Basic Online.
If I right click on it it brings up the box that says convert to dynamic disk and below that convert to GPT disk or MBR disk. On the other box to the right (the long one) if I right click it says New Simple Volume. Anyone care to tell me which to choose? Thanks.

 

[Tegeril]

New simple volume, I think.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Ok, thanks for the reply, but that doesn't fix it. New simple volume is my only choice on the volume of the disk. I have that down now. I have to chose whether GPT or MBR and after I do that I go over and make a new simple volume.

 

[Tegeril]

Pretty sure you want MBR.

 

[ingeborgdot]

After doing a lot of googling I found some things and actually the gpt way was to go. It is much more versatile and recommended by ms.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: ingeborgdot
After doing a lot of googling I found some things and actually the gpt way was to go. It is much more versatile and recommended by ms.

No. MS does not recommend this.

You do not want to use GPT on any sort of removable drive unless you absolutely must have the functionality that GPT offers. It is unlikely that you'll jbod, raid or otherwise leverage these features with an external drive unless you intend to use a great number of partitions. Even then I would suggest extended partitions as a means to accomplish this instead of Dynamic disks.

External, removable drives, or drives that *may* be removed (it happens by accident on SANs for instance) should use Simple disks whenever possible.

Reason being the LDM database on every disk in your system is identical. If the drive gets transplanted or removed/readded+inadvertently recognized as a new disk you'll run into mismatches between LDMs. This can often be recovered from merely by importing the now foreign disk. Worse trouble can happen though.

See best practices:
816307 Best practices for using dynamic disks on Windows Server 2003-based computers
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;816307

(no Vista version of this article available yet that I'm aware of).

 

[Smilin]

External, removable drives, or drives that *may* be removed (it happens by accident on SANs for instance) should use Simple disks whenever possible.

I meant MBR, not simple. My bad. I think you prolly knew that tho.

 

[ingeborgdot]

So you are saying that chose mbr and then go over and use simple disk to format. Right?

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: ingeborgdot
So you are saying that chose mbr and then go over and use simple disk to format. Right?

That question catches me surprisingly off guard. Uh this is what you want:

1. MBR disk (non-dynamic, non-gpt).
2. For your partitions create simple volumes (primary partitions). If you intend to have more than 4 partitions you'll want to create the fourth as an extended partition instead of primary. Not sure why you would want to do this on most PCs.
3. Format the partitions with NTFS. The only reason to do otherwise would be dual booting with another OS that can't read NTFS.

How those steps play out in the interface I'm going to have to leave to you. It's something I would either do without thinking about or learn on the fly. Shouldn't be hard tho.