Elastic Compute Service:Initialize a data disk (Windows)

Prerequisites

• You have created an empty data disk.

  Cloud disks that are created with an ECS instance are automatically initialized and ready to use.

• The data disk is in the In Use state.

Steps

1. Connect to the ECS instance.

   1. Go to ECS console - Instances. In the top-left corner, select the region and resource group for the target resource.

   2. On the instance details page, click Connect and select Workbench. Select Terminal Connection as the connection method, enter your username and password, and then log on to the instance.

2. Bring the disk online.

   1. On the Windows Server desktop, right-click the Start icon and select Disk Management.

   2. On the Disk Management page, find the target data disk in the offline state.

      If the Initialize Disk dialog box appears, the cloud disk is already online. You can proceed to initialize the cloud disk.

      If the data disk is already online and its partition status is Healthy, no further action is required. You can use the disk immediately.

   3. Right-click the target disk and select online.

      • If the disk status changes to online and the partition status is Healthy, the cloud disk is ready to use.

      • If the disk status is Not Initialized and the partition is Unallocated, you must initialize it.

3. Initialize the cloud disk.

   Initializing a cloud disk erases all data on it. Make sure the disk is empty before you proceed.

   1. Right-click the target disk and select Initialize Disk.

   2. In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select a partition style, and then click OK. 

      Important

      The MBR partition style supports a maximum disk capacity of 2 TiB. If your cloud disk is larger than 2 TiB, or if you plan to resize it beyond 2 TiB in the future, you must use the GPT partition style.

   3. Right-click the Unallocated area of the target disk and select New Simple Volume.

   4. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next to continue through the wizard.

      1. On the Specify Volume Size page, set the Simple volume size in MB and click Next.

         If you want to create only a single primary partition, use the default value. Alternatively, you can set a custom size to divide the target disk into multiple partitions.

      2. On the Assign Drive Letter or Path page, select Assign the following drive letter, and then click Next.

      3. On the Format Partition page, select Format this volume with the following settings, configure the formatting options, and then click Next.

         Important

         Choose the allocation unit size carefully. This setting cannot be changed after the partition is formatted. For more information about disk capacity limits, see NTFS overview.

         • If you plan to resize the disk to a capacity between 16 TiB and 32 TiB (inclusive), select 8192.

         • If you plan to resize the disk to a capacity between 32 TiB and 64 TiB (inclusive), select 16K.

         • In other cases, use the default value.

      4. Review the information for the new simple volume and click Finish to close the New Simple Volume Wizard.

4. Verify the result.

   If the target disk status is online and the partition status is Healthy, the disk is initialized and ready to use.

Related documents

• If your cloud disk runs low on space, you can resize the cloud disk to increase its capacity.

• To initialize a data disk for a Linux instance, see Initialize a data disk (Linux).