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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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NOTE Windows offers a command-line tool for managing mass storage:

diskpart, the successor to FDISK. It’s incredibly powerful and useful (and

dangerous without adequate knowledge). The book discusses diskpart in

Chapter 16, “Troubleshooting Operating Systems.”

Disk Initialization

Every hard drive in a Windows system has special information placed onto

the drive through a process called disk initialization. (CompTIA refers to this

as initializing a disk.) This initialization information includes identifiers that

say, “this drive belongs in this system” and other information that defines

what this hard drive does in the system. If the hard drive is part of a software

RAID array, for example, its RAID information is stored in the initialization.

If it’s part of a spanned volume, this is also stored there.

All new drives must be initialized before you can use them. When you

install an extra hard drive into a Windows system and start Disk

Management, it notices the new drive and starts the Hard Drive Initialization

Wizard. If you don’t let the wizard run, the drive will be listed as unknown

(see Figure 9-32).

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