There is a small hidden recovery partition, then the main Windows partition, then a third for Data that in this instance is a logical partition. This drive shows a common configuration that can be seen on store-bought pre Windows-8 machines where the hard drive is partitioned with the traditional MBR (or msdos) partititon table. Any partitions that you are already familiar with as drives in Windows will have the same names and drive letters. Drives are numbered from zero so the first or only drive will be designated as Disk-0. If you only have one hard drive and no currently connected USB storage devices then you may see something similar to our example in fig:1. In Win-8 right click in the bottom left live corner and from the popup menu choose Disk Management. This will open the Computer Management console from where you can select Disk Management from the tools list. Or right click on a My Computer or Computer icon or button and from the popup menu choose Manage.

Or if you prefer you can just type the same into a run or search box. Right click on the desktop and from the popup menu select New > Shortcut and then type in diskmgmt.msc and press Enter a couple of times.

There are several ways you can get to Disk Management but the simplest is to create a shortcut. These updates have however introduced a few small issues when working with traditional devices, so unless you are working with only the very latest hardware and software you should have a look at our article about that.

It has evolved over time and in the latest generation of Windows it has been updated to fully support the new Advanced Format architecture and the upcoming GUID partitioning scheme. The Disk Management tool in Windows has been around for a while and it gives us a nice graphical view of the partition structure of hard drives and devices.

Windows disk management tool