Inside Microsoft Windows 2000, Third Edition (Microsoft Programming Series)

Chapter 10

Storage management defines the way that an operating system interfaces with nonvolatile storage devices and media. The term storage encompasses many different devices, including tape drives, optical media, CD jukeboxes, floppy diskettes, and hard disks. Microsoft Windows 2000 provides specialized support for each of these classes of storage media. Because our focus in this book is on the kernel components of Windows 2000, in this chapter we'll concentrate on just the fundamentals of the hard disk storage subsystem in Windows 2000. Significant portions of the Windows 2000 support for removable media and remote storage (offline archiving) are implemented in user mode.

In this chapter, we'll define basic and dynamic disks and explain how they are partitioned. We'll then examine how kernel-mode device drivers interface file system drivers to disk media. We'll also go over the implementation of multipartition disk-management features in Windows 2000, including replicating and dividing file system data across physical disks for reliability and for performance enhancement. We conclude the chapter with a look at the process that Windows 2000 uses to assign drive letters and a discussion of how file system drivers mount volumes they are responsible for managing.