2. Adding a Mirror to an Existing Volume
You can use an existing volume to create a mirrored set.
To do this, the volume you want to mirror must be a basic partition or
simple volume, and you must have an area of unallocated space on a
second drive of equal or larger size than the existing volume.
In Disk Management, you can mirror an existing volume by following
these steps:
Right-click the basic partition or simple volume you want to
mirror, and then click Add Mirror. This displays the Add Mirror
dialog box, shown in Figure 5.
In the Disks list, select a location for the mirror, and then
click Add Mirror. Keep in mind that only disks that have an area of
unallocated space that is equal or larger in size are listed.
If you are trying to mirror a partition on a basic disk,
you’ll see the warning prompt shown in Figure 6. This
indicates that the disk will be converted to a dynamic disk.
Windows 7 begins the mirror creation process. In Disk
Management, you’ll see a status of Resynching on both volumes. The
disk on which the mirrored volume is being created has a warning
icon. Once mirroring is complete the mirrored volume should have a
Healthy status. This is the status of a redundant volume that is
performing correctly.
3. Shrinking or Extending Volumes
In Disk Management, you can change the size of partitions, simple volumes, and spanned volumes. When you reduce the size
of a volume, you shrink the volume to free up available space. When you
increase the size of a volume, you extend the volume into unallocated
space. For spanned volumes on dynamic disks, the extended space can come
from any available dynamic disk, not only those on which the volume was
originally created. This enables
you to combine areas of free space on multiple dynamic disks and use
those areas to increase the size of an existing volume.
You can shrink and extend volumes only if they are formatted and
the filesystem uses NTFS. You can’t shrink or extend striped or mirrored
volumes.
You can shrink a volume by completing the following steps:
In Disk Management’s Graphical view, right-click the volume
that you want to shrink and then select Shrink Volume. After
checking the disk to determine how much space can be removed, Disk
Management displays the Shrink dialog box shown in Figure 7.
The Shrink dialog box provides the following
information:
- Total size before shrink in MB
Shows the current capacity of the volume in MB. This is
the formatted size of the volume.
- Size of available shrink space in MB
Shows the maximum amount by which you can shrink the
volume. This doesn’t represent the total amount of free space
on the volume. Instead, it represents the maximum amount of
space that can be removed safely.
- Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB
Shows the total amount of space that will be removed
from the volume. The initial value defaults to the maximum
amount of space that you can remove from the volume.
- Total size after shrink in MB
Shows what the total capacity of the volume in MB will
be after the shrink. This is the new formatted size of the
volume.
Enter the amount of space to shrink the volume and then click
Shrink to shrink the volume.
You can extend a volume by completing the following steps:
In Disk Management’s Graphical view, right-click the volume
that you want to extend and then select Extend Volume.
When the Extend Volume Wizard opens, read the introductory
message and then click Next.
On the Select Disks page, shown in Figure 8, the disk you right-clicked is
listed in the Selected list with all of its remaining unallocated
space selected for use in extending the volume.
In the Available list, you’ll see available space on other
dynamic disks. If you add one or more of these additional disks to
the Selected list, you’ll be able to use the free space on these
disks as well. However, doing so will create a spanned volume with
no fault tolerance.
Click Next and then click Finish. Disk Management will extend
the volume.
