Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition

Volume Management

Windows introduces the concept of basic and dynamic disks. Windows calls disks that rely exclusively on the MBR-style or GPT partitioning scheme basic disks. Dynamic disks are new to Windows 2000 and implement a more flexible partitioning scheme than that of basic disks. The fundamental difference between basic and dynamic disks is that dynamic disks support the creation of new multipartition volumes. Recall from the list of terms in the preceding section that multipartition volumes provide performance, sizing, and reliability features not supported by simple volumes. Windows manages all disks as basic disks unless you manually create dynamic disks or convert existing basic disks (with enough free space) to dynamic disks. Microsoft ...