Logical Disk Manager Support of PartitionGuru

The Logical Disk Manager is an implementation of a logical volume manager for Microsoft Windows. It was introduced with the Windows 2000 operating system, and is supported in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Dynamic disks provide the capability for software implementations of RAID. All volumes on dynamic disks are known as dynamic volumes. It is possible to have 2000 dynamic volumes per dynamic disk. Dynamic disks provide features that basic disks do not, such as the ability to create volumes that span multiple disks (spanned and striped volumes), and the ability to create fault tolerant volumes (mirrored and RAID-5 volumes).

The following sections describe the different types of dynamic volumes.

Simple Volumes: Simple volumes are the dynamic-disk equivalent of the primary partitions and logical drives found on basic disks.

Spanned Volumes: Spanned volumes combine areas of unallocated space from multiple disks into one logical volume. The areas of unallocated space can be different sizes. Spanned volumes require two and up to 32 disks.

Striped Volumes: Striped volumes improve disk input/output (I/O) performance by distributing I/O requests across disks. Striped volumes are composed of stripes of data of equal size written across each disk in the volume. They are created from equally sized, unallocated areas on two or more disks.

Mirrored Volumes: A mirrored volume is a fault-tolerant volume that provides a copy of a volume on another disk. Mirrored volumes provide data redundancy by duplicating the information contained on the volume. The two disks that make up a mirrored volume are known as mirrors. Each mirror is always located on a different disk. If one of the disks fails, the data on the failed disk becomes unavailable, but the system continues to operate by using the unaffected disk.

RAID-5 Volumes: A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume that stripes data and parity across three or more disks. Parity is a calculated value that is used to reconstruct data if one disk fails. When a disk fails, Windows Server 2003 continues to operate by recreating the data that was on the failed disk from the remaining data and parity.

PartitionGuru supports Logical Disk Manager and the dynamic volumes and the files it it can be listed. All dynamic volumes are listed on the left panel under "Dynamic Volumes" item:

(Dynamic Partitions)

(Dynamic Volumes)

When the "Dynamic Volumes" item is selected, the diagram of the layout of all dynamic disks will be displayed on the partition information panel. When you click a partition of a volume on the diagram, all other partitions of this volume will be automatically selected. You can open a volume by double clicking. The program will switch to the file list view.

PartitionGuru supports the dynamic volumes on virtual disks. Just open the virtual disk and the dynamic volumes will be automatically loaded just like the normal hard disks.

PartitionGuru supports the following operations on dynamic volumes such as formatting, copying files, recover files, back up partition, etc.

In addition, if you converted a basic disk to dynamic disk accidentally, you can use PartitionGuru to convert it back to basic disk. PartitionGuru can lossless convert the dynamic disks which only have simple volumes to basic disks.