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Manage and configure your PC’s disks from CMD with DISKPART

First of all, we must be fully aware that one of the most important components of any PC is its disk drives. That is precisely why its maintenance and correct use is so important. For all this we can use different programs that help us diagnose your health and correct possible errors. It is also important that we do not keep them at the limit of occupied space, or defragment them from time to time.

On the other hand, it is interesting to know that the Windows operating system how much with its own function that basically serves us in disk management. In this way we will have a complete solution to manage the PC’s disk drives without installing any additional software. This is precisely what we want to talk about next, since thanks to DISKPART, we have the possibility of reducing or increasing the size of the volume, of a partition, creating new ones, etc.

Open and use the Windows disc feature

Once we know what we are facing, it is important to know that this functionality does not have its section in the Graphic interface of the system. This means that we will have to use it through a series of commands, all from a command prompt window. Thus, first of all and to take advantage of all this, we have to open this section by typing cmd in the search box on the taskbar.

Of course, we recommend that you open this window with administrator permissions. We can do this by simply right-clicking on the corresponding run entry and selecting Run as administrator.

open cmd manager

Keep in mind that the DISKPART function runs in its own space. This means that when we are working with this command, we will not be able to execute others in the CMD, only those of the functionality. Therefore, to put it into operation, once in the command prompt window we write the following:

Diskpart

In these same lines, we are going to show the commands that you can use to manage disk drives once we access the DISKPART tool. Keep in mind that some of these commands that we will show you require you to specify the units or sizes to make the modifications. You also have the parameter Help that will help you when it comes to work with these orders that we are going to show you next.

Typing this independently, we find the commands that we can use in this section. But we can also use this one followed by a specific one to see the parameters that we can use in each case.

help rem

Commands to use with DISKPART

From that moment on we will find ourselves in the environment of our own command, so we can only use functions belonging to it. In the event that we want to execute other independent commands, we would first have to log out here. Therefore, next, we will see the DISKPART commands that you can use in that window to better manage our disk units.

  • Active: specifies the disk partition we are on as active.
  • Add: shows the volume we are on on the disk.
  • Assign: Assign a drive letter to the disk volume.
  • Attach vdisk – Mount a virtual hard disk to appear as a local disk drive.
  • Attributes: lets us see the attributes of a disk drive or volume.
  • Automount – Enables or disables the auto mount feature.
  • Break: part the current volume in two.
  • Clean: clean all the formats of the partition.
  • Compact vdisk: reduces the size of a file from virtual hard drive dynamic.
  • Convert: Convert FAT and FAT32 volumes to NTFS without touching files and folders.
  • Create – Generates a new disk partition, volume, or virtual hard disk.
  • Delete: deletes a partition or volume from the drive.
  • Detach vdisk – Prevents the selected active virtual hard disk from appearing as a local hard disk.
  • Detail: it offers us on screen information about the active disk, partition, volume, or virtual disk.
  • Exit: close the DiSKPART session.

help disk

  • Expand vdisk: add space to the virtual hard disk.
  • Extend – Extend the volume or partition along with its File System to the unallocated space of the drive.
  • Filesystems: shows us information about the current file system and the supported ones.
  • Format: formats the hard drive to be compatible with it. Windows system.
  • GPT: gives GPT attributes to the partition on disks with GUID partition table.
  • Help: it offers us on screen a list of the commands available here or about a specific one.
  • Import: is responsible for importing a group of external drives to the group on the local computer.
  • Inactive – Marks the system or boot partition as inactive on master boot disks.
  • List: shows us a list of available disks, partitions or volumes.
  • Offline: turns off an active hard drive or volume.
  • Online – Activates a disk or volume.
  • Recover: refreshes the status of hard drives and tries to recover those that are reflected as invalid.
  • Rem: it is a way to add comments to a certain script.
  • Remove: deletes the letter of a disk drive.
  • Repair: troubleshoot a volume RAID-5 replacing the failing region with a dynamic disk.
  • Rescan: find new disks on the PC.
  • Retain – prepares a dynamic volume for use as a boot.
  • San: offers us the network policy of storage area for the operating system.
  • Select: change the active disk, partition or volume.
  • Set id: modifies the identifier of a partition to the active partition.
  • Shrink: reduces the size of the volume.
  • Uniqueid: let us see the partition table identifier GUID and master boot record signature.

Third-party alternatives to DISKPART

All this that we have told you before will be of great help when it comes to managing our hard drives and partitions directly from Windows. But as you can imagine, there are also third-party programs that help us with these same tasks. It is precisely for this reason that below we are going to show you some interesting alternatives in this regard that you can download and install on the system.

  • Active @ Partition Manager: here we find an interesting as well as powerful application for this type of process related to disk drives. It is a free partition manager with a good number of additional features. With it we can treat the PC hard drives and it supports FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, etc.
  • DiskGenius: another interesting alternative In this sense we also find it with DiskGenius, one that presents basic and advanced functions such as resizing and dividing partitions, converting the format of disks, etc. In addition to being a partition manager, we can use it for data recovery or backup management.
  • EaseUS Partition Master – This is another free program that allows us to create, format, move or resize partitions. It also has functions to convert these elements and say that it focuses on more professional use than other similar solutions.

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