Managing physical disks and volumes

Windows Server 2022 requires a computer with at least one disk drive (in most cases, this is your C:\ drive). You can connect a disk drive via different bus types, such as IDE, SATA, SAS, or USB. Before you can utilize a disk in Windows, you need to initialize it and create volumes or partitions.

You can use two partitioning schemes: the older format of MBR and the more recent GPT. The MBR scheme, first introduced with the PC DOS 2 in 1983, had some restrictions. For example, the largest partition supported with MBR is just 2 TB. And creating more than four partitions requires you to create an extended partition and create additional partitions inside the extended partition. The GPT scheme enables much larger drives (partition limits are OS-imposed) and up to 128 partitions per drive. You typically use GPT partitioning with Windows Server.

In this chapter, you use eight new virtual disk devices in the server, SRV1 and create/use new volumes...