User`s guide

group is discontinued, though its name is kept in the above registry key. In case a dynamic disk is

created or connected again, a disk group with an incremental name is created.

When moved to another machine, a disk group is considered as foreign (p. 87) and cannot be used

until imported into the existing disk group. The import updates the configuration data on both the

local and the foreign disks so that they form a single entity. A foreign group is imported as is (will

have the original name) if no disk group exists on the machine.

For more information about disk groups please refer to the following Microsoft knowledge base

article:

222189 Description of Disk Groups in Windows Disk Management

http ://support.microsoft.com/kb/222189/EN-US/

Disk type

The type of disk, which is determined by the way the disk is organized.

A disk has one of two types: basic disk (p. 82) or dynamic disk (p. 85).

Drive

A physical device for accessing information on a disk (p. 84).

Examples of drives include hard disk drives (p. 88) and floppy disk drives.

Drive letter

See Volume letter (p. 94).

Dynamic disk

A hard disk that is managed by Logical Disk Manager (LDM), which is available in Windows starting

with Windows 2000.

Use of LDM helps to flexibly allocate volumes on a disk for fault tolerance, better performance or

larger volume size.

A dynamic disk can use either the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT)

partitioning scheme (p. 90).

Each dynamic disk has a hidden database where the LDM stores the configuration of all dynamic

volumes existing in the disk group, which makes for better storage reliability. On an MBR disk, this

database occupies the last 1 MB of the disk. On a GPT disk, Windows creates the dedicated LDM

Metadata partition, taking space from the Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR.)