›› Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service

Stated very simply, the Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service allows you to configure your hard drive(s). If a new hard drive is installed on your computer, it will be detected by the Logical Disk Manager service, which, in turn, will notify the Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service of all disk information. Once it has received this information, it can then get to work automatically configuring your new hard drive for Windows. If you wish to configure an existing drive, this service is activated once you have made disk configuration changes in the MMC Disk Management snap-in located in the Administrative Tools folder inside the Control Panel. While in the MMC Disk Management snap-in, you can make any number of changes to your drives such as converting your basic disks to dynamic, formatting your volumes, changing a page file, changing a drive letter and path, etc...

As an example of how this service works, let's say that you decide to partition an existing drive that you have in your computer. If you partition a drive, it means that you split one physical drive into separate logical drives. For example, you may have one 100 GB hard drive that you want to partition into two logical drives, one being C: that has 75 GB of space and the other being D: that has 25 GB of space. So now, instead of having one physical hard drive with 100 GB of space, you now have one physical hard drive with two logical drives, one with 75 GB and the other with 25 GB of space. In order to do the configuration, you open the MMC Disk Management snap-in and change the partitioning. As soon as you make the changes, the Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service detects your changes and carries them out for you.

Another example would be if you bought a new hard drive and decided to install it. Once you install the hard drive, Plug and Play would detect the new hard drive and begin making system allocations. In the meantime, the Logical Disk Manager service is watching Plug and Play events and notices that there is a new hard drive on your computer. It takes all of the disk information about your hard drive to the Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service, which then formats and configures the new drive for Windows.

It is recommended that you keep this service set to Manual. It will only be activated when the MMC Disk Management snap-in is open or whenever drive configuration changes occur. This service is usually stopped, and it only starts when you decide to configure a drive or partition or when a new drive is added to the system. Once it is done with its configuration, the service stops again. You should only disable this service if you don't plan on adding any hardware to your computer or do not want to configure your current drives. If you do decide to disable this service, you will not be able to use the MMC Disk Management snap-in to configure disks.

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