Richard Siddaway's Blog

I really like Windows Server Core. The concept has come of age in Windows 2012.

I needed to add a new disk to a virtual machine  - that’s easy using the Hyper-V cmdlets. But what about formating the disk.

A module new to Windows 2012 & Windows can be used.  Its the Storage module.  I’ve not had chance, or reason, to play with this module yet. So many cmdlets so little time.

Start with viewing the disks:

PS C:\Users\richard> Get-Disk | ft -a

Number Friendly Name          OperationalStatus Total Size Partition Style
------ -------------          ----------------- ---------- ---------------
0      Virtual HD ATA Device  Online                120 GB MBR
1      Microsoft Virtual Disk Offline               127 GB RAW

Disk 1 is the new disk so need to initialise it.

PS C:\Users\richard> Initialize-Disk -Number 1 -PartitionStyle MBR

View the disks again

PS C:\Users\richard> Get-Disk | ft -a

Number Friendly Name          OperationalStatus Total Size Partition Style
------ -------------          ----------------- ---------- ---------------
0      Virtual HD ATA Device  Online                120 GB MBR
1      Microsoft Virtual Disk Online                127 GB MBR

Create a partition on the disk -   -useMaximimSize means use all of the disk for this partition

PS C:\Users\richard> New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -DriveLetter R

Now view the partitions

PS C:\Users\richard> Get-Partition | ft -a

   Disk Number: 0

PartitionNumber DriveLetter Offset         Size Type
--------------- ----------- ------         ---- ----
1                           1048576      350 MB IFS
2               C           368050176 119.66 GB IFS

   Disk Number: 1

PartitionNumber DriveLetter Offset    Size Type
--------------- ----------- ------    ---- ----
1               R           1048576 127 GB Logical

And finally format the new disk:

PS C:\Users\richard> Get-Volume | where DriveLetter -eq R | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel Backup

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Warning, all data on the volume will be lost!
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"): Y

You get a nice friendly warning (you could bypass using –Confirm $false) and the format happens

You could pipe the cmdlets together to do everything in one pass. Best of all – the cmdlets are WMI based.

Windows Server 2012 has a PowerShell enabled backup utility. When you enable the feature you get a module called WindowsServerBackup.  It has the cmldets you would expect for creating and managing backups. No surprise you may say as this was avialable in Windows 2008 R2.

The difference with Windows Server 2012 is that you can do restores from PowerShell cmdlets whcih wasn’t available in the earlier version.

The restore cmdlets are

Start-WBFileRecovery

Start-WBHyperVRecovery

Start-WBSystemStateRecovery

Start-WBVolumeRecovery

This might not replace your currebt backup system but is very useful for backing up test environments and experimenting with things like authorative AD restores.