1. Disk quotas are individually configured for each partition or volume in the system. Use Windows Explorer or My Computer to go to the volume that you want to configure for disk quotas.
2. Right-click the volume and choose Properties from the pop-up menu.
3. Click the Quota tab.This will give you the window shown in Figure 4.18. If you don’t see a Quota tab, either you don’t have the permissions to configure disk quotas or you are viewing a FAT or FAT32 volume.
4. Check the box labeled Enable quota management.This allows quotas to be set for this volume.
5. Check the box labeled Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit. If you don’t check this box, users will be warned when they reach their limit, but they will not be denied from adding more data to the volume.
6. Now you need to set a default limit for all new users accessing the volume. Click the radio button next to Limit disk space to. Choose the amount of space allowed and set at what limit to warn the user.
Figure 4.18The Quota Tab of a Volumes Properties
7. To manually add a quota restriction for a user, click Quota Entries.
This will give you the window shown in Figure 4.19.
8. Choose Quota | New Quota.
9. Type in the name of the user to be assigned quota restrictions.
10. Click Check Names resolve the name.
11. Click OK to continue.This will give you the Add New Quota Entry window shown in Figure 4.20.
12. Choose either to not limit disk usage or enter in a maximum size limit and click OK.Your new quota entry will appear in the list of assigned quotas, as shown in Figure 4.19.
Why use one file system over the other? It is really a matter of choice and preference. Use FAT32 if you are looking for compatibility with other Windows operating systems (maybe to dual-boot between 98 and XP) and increased disk space over FAT16. Use NTFS if you need file-level security and a self-healing file system. Also, use NTFS if you need support for compression, file encryption, or disk quotas.
Figure 4.19The Quota Entry Window
Basic versus Dynamic Disks
There are multiple types of storage and multiple types of volumes.To begin,
“basic” storage uses normal partition tables, which are supported by all versions of Windows-based operating systems.When you configure a hard disk for “basic”
storage, you configure it to hold primary and extended partitions with logical drives. Basic storage uses partitions, not volumes. Dynamic disks contain volumes.
A volume is an area of storage on your hard disk. A volume is formatted with a file system and has a drive letter assigned to it. Remember a single hard disk can have multiple volumes and volumes can span many hard disks.
A basic partition in Windows XP will support volume sets and stripe sets if they were already in place before you upgraded your computer from Windows NT 4.0 Workstation to Windows XP. However, you cannot create any new stripe sets or volume sets on basic disks after upgrading to XP.To create these special disk sets, you must convert your hard disk from basic to dynamic. On dynamic volumes, the disk configurations are named differently than in NT (as shown in the following list).
A dynamic volume can be one of five types:
■ Simple They are not fault tolerant, but can be extended as needed.
■ Spanned They can be extended to a max of 32 disks.They are used to allow multiple drives to have the appearance of being one large drive, but they do not provide fault tolerance.
■ Mirrored They can be created only on Windows 2000 servers or later.
Requires at least two dynamic disks. Mirrors provide fault tolerance by keeping a duplicate copy of everything on a second drive.The same drive letter is used for both drives in the mirror.
Figure 4.20Adding a New Quota Entry
■ Striped Requires at least two dynamic disks.They can use up to 32 disks and are not fault tolerant.They provide an increase in drive perfor- mance because multiple (up to 32) drive heads are reading and writing at the same time.
■ RAID 5 RAID 5 volumes are fault tolerant, and they function by having data striped across three or more hard disks. Parity enables you to recreate the data when a failure occurs. In RAID level 5, both parity and data are striped across a set of disks.The downside to this is that write performance of RAID 5 is not very fast.
Windows XP supports only simple, spanned, and striped volumes.Windows XP does not support fault tolerant disk sets, such as mirrored or RAID 5 volumes.
Only the Windows Server operating systems support fault tolerant disk sets.
Using spanned volumes gives you flexibility with your drive configuration.
For example, let’s say that you have four 3GB hard drives. One is used as the boot and system partition for XP.The other three are used for storage. Instead of having three separate 3GB volumes (each with their own drive letter), you could combine all of the disks into one larger 9GB volume. Now you don’t have to remember which drive contains the data you need. All data appears to be stored in the same place.
Striped volumes provide the same flexibility as spanned volumes, but they also increase your hard disk performance. Just like with the spanned volume, you would have three separate 3GB drives functioning as one larger 9GB volume.
The difference is in the way that the information is stored on the disk. Even though spanned volumes appear as one volume, the data is still written to one drive at a time.When one drive becomes full, the information is written to the next drive in the set.With striped volumes, all of the drives read and write at the same time. Having more drive heads working for you at the same time provides faster access time and better overall performances.
Here are a few important facts to be remember about dynamic disks:
■ You can only create dynamic volumes on dynamic disks.
■ Only computers running Windows 2000 or later are able to access dynamic volumes.
■ Dynamic volumes are not supported with removable storage or portable storage.
■ If a computer will be dual-booted between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, do not use dynamic disk.
We now go over the steps necessary to make a dynamic disk and to create a volume.You already made a basic disk in the last section when you installed the new drive and configured it to use FAT32.To convert that drive to a dynamic disk, follow these steps:
1. Right-click the drive (not the volume or partition) and select Convert to dynamic disk…. Once this is selected, you will be asked what disks you want to participate. Choose Disk 1.
2. You will be shown a list of what is about to be made dynamic, click Convertbutton.
3. You will be warned that the volumes on this particular disk will become inoperable for other systems to be able to boot from. Click Yes and also agree to dismount any file systems.You will (after a few seconds) see the word “Basic” turn into “Dynamic.”
Working with Removable Storage
Removable Storage is a service used for managing removable media (such as tapes and discs) and storage devices (libraries). Removable Storage allows applica- tions to access and share the same media resources.The Removable Storage icon is located in Computer Management under the Storage section.This tool helps you label, catalog, and track your removable media. Removable Storage works together with your backup system to make it possible to use removable media with NTBackup.
Dynamic Disks
Each dynamic disk made maintains a 1MB database. This database con- tains information about the volumes on that disk and all other dynamic disks on that system. The database is duplicated on every disk so that in the event of a database crash, you stand a better chance of not losing the data. When converting a basic disk to dynamic, you must have at least 1MB of unpartitioned space in order to create the 1MB database.
Configuring & Implementing…
Removable storage uses media pools to organize all the media in your libraries into separate sections.You must enable the device and right-click it to create the actual media pool. Removable Storage is mainly utilized when you have high- end backup equipment. For more information on the creating and managing of media pools you can use the Windows XP Professional Help system.To access Help, go to Start | Help and Support and use the search engine to look for
“media pools” or “removable storage.”
Creating a Media Pool
Both a Zip drive and your CD-ROM can function as removable media. In the following steps, we are using both. Follow these steps to create a media pool:
1. Open Computer Management (Start | Control Panel and open Administrative Tools and then Computer Management).
2. Expand Storage.
3. Expand Removable Storage. (Make sure your CD-ROM and Zip drive are installed and configured properly.)
4. Click the Media icon.You will see your CD-ROM and Zip drive mounted in the right-hand side of the MMC.
5. Expand the Libraries folder.You will see your storage as shown in Figure 4.21.
Figure 4.21Removable Storage Contents within the Management Console (Simple View)
6. Right-click on Removable Storage and choose View | Full.
7. The Media Pools icon will appear in the Console. Expand Media Pools.
8. Right-click Media Pools and select Create Media Pool.
9. Name the media pool New Pool.You will see it created in the contents pane.
10. Right-click New Pool and select Create another media pool.
11. Call this new pool ZIP. In the media information box, click Contains media typeand scroll through the drop-down box until you can find Iomega Zip. Select it and click OK.
12. Do the same from the CD-ROM (name it CD ROM and select CD ROMfrom the drop-down box). A new media pool has been created.
Managing Devices
The Device Manager is a graphical utility that you can use to do many tasks on your machine. In this section, we cover these tasks in detail and go over the importance of each one.You have to know how to work with Device Manager in order to successfully troubleshoot Windows XP.
From Windows 95 up (except for Windows NT 4.0, which doesn’t have Device Manager), you can find Device Manager in the Control Panel’s System applet amongst the various tabs. XP has the Device Manager accessible in two locations.You can find it either in Computer Management, or in the Control Panel by clicking System, clicking the Hardware tab, and clicking Device Manager. Figure 4.22 shows Device Manager.
Once you get to the Device Manager, simply click it to produce the Utility contents in the Contents pane of the MMC.You will find all the hardware cur- rently installed on your machine.This is a handy utility because you can do the following things:
■ Troubleshoot hardware by using the error signs (red X, yellow exclama- tion point, and question marks)
■ Enable, disable, or remove hardware
■ Change and update current drivers
■ Scan for hardware changes
■ Find driver details and resource usage, and modify advanced hardware settings
In order to troubleshoot device drivers, you need to be logged on as an Administrator.To troubleshoot hardware with error signs (red X, yellow exclama- tion point, and question marks) all you need to do is open Device Manager, and it will display the troubled devices. Figure 4.23 shows Device Manager indicating a disabled network card.
Figure 4.22The Device Manager Utility in Computer Management
Figure 4.23The Device Manager Utility with a Disabled NIC
You can see that the Linksys NIC card has been disabled because of the red X over the NIC icon.This is the sign for a disabled hardware.You can go into the properties of the device by right-clicking the device and selecting
Properties from the pop-up menu. From the hardware device properties dialog box, you can see that the device is disabled.
A question mark usually signals that a device is unknown and you need to install the correct drivers. Generally, this happens when an unknown device was picked up by Plug and Play but was never configured. A yellow exclamation point means that an attempt may have been made to configure the device, but a critical error occurred, or the wrong drivers were used, as shown in Figure 4.24. Most of the time it is a driver issue, but always dig deeper into your troubleshooting steps to isolate what it could be.There have been occasions where a boot sector virus produced yellow exclamation points on hard disks in Device Manager.
Enabling, Disabling, or Removing Hardware and Changing and Updating the Current Drivers
You can disable devices to help you troubleshoot.What if you needed to resolve a hardware resource conflict issue? Isolating the problem by disabling one of the Figure 4.24Device Manager Showing a Problem with a Hardware Device
devices is almost guaranteed to assist you in understanding the problem. Maybe you want to force a rescan of the system to reinstall a piece of hardware. If you want to force detection using Plug and Play, you can refresh the Device Manager and it will scan the machine looking for new hardware.When the hardware is found, you will be prompted to install it. Other options within a device’s (a hard disk, in this example) properties sheet are shown in Figure 4.25. From here, you can change specific things based on the hardware that you choose.
You can find IRQ (Interrupt Request) values and more within the View menu of Device Manager. Select View | View Resources by Connection.This is how you can isolate a piece of hardware to be disabled in order to find a resource con- flict.This rarely happens these days, unless you are using older devices.
NOTE
Device Manager by default does not show you all of the details on cur- rently installed hardware. Choose View | Show Hidden Devices to see everything.
Figure 4.25Hardware Device Properties
Using the Event Viewer
If you have a problem with a machine, the first place you should look is the Event Viewer. It is the easiest and most informative tool (sometimes).When troubleshooting a problem, chances are good that the Event Viewer has logged the problem. In addition to helping you solve problems, the Event Viewer can help you audit events.The basic idea here that the Event Viewer is used to view events that happen on your system.
Event Logs
What exactly is a log anyway? A log is a file that contains information.This infor- mation is often used to audit what events are taking place or to troubleshoot a failed event.There are all types of logs, such as installation error logs (which help you troubleshoot a failed installation), RSVP logs (used to troubleshoot Windows XP’s Quality of Service), and backup logs (which indicate which files have been successfully backed up). In this section, we focus on the logs found within the Event Viewer. If you have a system event, like a service not starting or a device driver failure, the event log will pick up on it, timestamp it, and log it. Event Viewer displays detailed information about specific system events that includes date, time, the ID of the Event, and the user who was logged on when the event took place.
Navigating to the Event Viewer
To open Event Viewer, go to Start | Control Panel and open Administrative Tools and then Computer Management. Scroll down to Event Viewer under System Tools, as shown in Figure 4.26.You will see three logs here by default—
Application, Security, and System.
NOTE
Sometimes you may want to check out the Event Viewer of a remote machine. With the appropriate permissions, you may do so in Computer Management. To do this, open Computer Management and right-click Computer Management (Local) and select Connect to another com- puter. Type in the name of the remote computer and click OK.
Application Log
The first log is the Application log.You can use the Application log for viewing event with applications that are installed on your machine.The Applications log contains events that occur from both applications and programs, and it will report problems with either of them.When you turn on Security auditing, it puts a notice in the Application log.
System Log
The System log is where you would want to go to find system-related or system- generated events.This could be an issue with a logon problem, an issue with cer- tain system services not starting (such as netlogon), or maybe when and what service pack or hot fix was installed on the machine. Remember that the System log will log system component events.
Security Log
The Security log is disabled by default.You must enable auditing in the Local Security Policy applet in the Administrative Tools folder. Once you enable auditing (it will indicate in the application log that you turned it on), you will have logs of successes or failures of audited objects.
Figure 4.26The Event Viewer Utility within Computer Management
To enable auditing, go to the Local Security Policy MMC in the Administrative Tools folder. Select Audit Policy under the Local Policies folder. In the contents pane of the MMC, you will find the following choices:
■ Audit account logon events
■ Audit account management
■ Audit directory service access
■ Audit logon events
■ Audit object access
■ Audit policy change
■ Audit privilege use
■ Audit process tracking
■ Audit system events
Double-click the event that you wish to audit and select Success, Failure, or both. Click OK. Now XP will audit the selected events.
NOTE
You will see other logs besides these three on domain controllers. You will see Directory Service logs, FRS logs, and possibly DNS logs. You can customize logs towards specific things, which makes troubleshooting much easier. You will not see these extra logs on Windows XP
Professional, just be aware that they are out there.
How to Work with and Troubleshoot the Logs
Knowing how to manage the logs is important. Managing includes configuring, adjusting, saving, and securing the logs.You need to know how to customize them so that you can filter only information you want to see. In order to under- stand filtering, you need to first address the different possible types of events:
■ Error A significant problem likely to cause a loss of functionality.
■ Warning Not very significant, but may eventually lead to a problem.