The new SkyDrive rocks…

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft SkyDrive

Today Microsoft released some new SkyDrive Apps for Windows and Mac and alos offers 25GB of free online storage. I really love SkyDrive to keep my files in sync and access them everywhere. With the new apps the integration is much better, easier and 25GB of free storage is a fair deal.

Making personal cloud storage for Windows available anywhere, with the new SkyDrive

With the new Apps, SkyDrive is integrated in your operating system. If you need some online Storage, Cloud Sync or you are already using a service like Dropbox or GDrive you should have a closer look at Microsoft SkyDrive.

New features:

SkyDrive for the Windows desktop (preview available now). View and manage your personal SkyDrive directly from Windows Explorer on Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista with this new preview app available in 106 languages worldwide.
Fetching files through SkyDrive.com. Easily access, browse, and stream files from a remote PC running the preview app to just about anywhere by simply fetching them via SkyDrive.com.
SkyDrive storage updates. A new, more flexible approach to personal cloud storage that allows power users to get additional paid storage as their needs grow.
SkyDrive for other devices. We’ve updated the SkyDrive apps on Windows Phone and iOS devices, bringing better management features and sharing options to those devices. We’re also releasing a new preview client for Mac OS X Lion, letting you manage your SkyDrive right from the Finder.

Checkout more about SkyDrive

Replace Diskpart with Windows PowerShell – Basic Storage cmdlets

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 8

Last week I made a blog post about how you can create a USB drive for Windows To Go. In my post I used diskpart.exe to format the USB drive. Now we don’t live in the stone age anymore, so I did the same with the new version of Windows PowerShell coming in Windows 8 and Windows Server 8.

Now here some basic cmdlets to do some simple storage operations, like clean a disk, create a partition and so on.

Lets start simple

List all disks

Get-Disk

Now get all partitions

Get-Partition

Now get all partitions of disk 0

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 0

Clear a Disk

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData

Create a new partition

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize

Format this volume

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 1 | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS

Create new partition and format it with the label “USB”:

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB

Change driveletter

Set-Partition -DriveLetter E -NewDriveLetter T

Set a partition active

Set-Partition -DriveLetter T -IsActive $ture

Remove a partition

Remove-Partition -DriveLetter T

Bring a disk online

 Set-Disk 1 -isOffline $false

Remove Readonly flag

 Set-Disk 1 -isReadOnly $false

Initialize Disk with GPT

 Initialize-Disk 1 -PartitionStyle GPT

This is some basic knowledge about the storage module in PowerShell v3. Lets see how we can change the commands from using diskpart to Windows PowerShell.

Diskpart.exe

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign letter=e

PowerShell:

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -IsActive -DriveLetter E | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB