With &os2;, the following terminology is used when dealing with storage devices:
  1. A drive is a logical entity that has been assigned a drive letter by the &os2; kernel. You can therefore have up to 26 drives, which are named from A: to Z:.

    The &link_drivesfdr; shows all drives that currently exist on your system. Drives A: and B: will always be diskette drives per definition. Other drive letters will either be hard disk volumes (see below), CD-ROM or DVD drives, network resources that have been assigned a drive letter, or other storage hardware.

  2. A volume is a concept specific to hard disks and consists of one or more partitions (see below). A volume must be formatted with a specific file system in order to be able to hold data.

  3. A partition is a physical segment of a hard disk. In order to be used with personal computers, each hard disk must at least have one partition, but can be divided into several, for example if you want to use more than one operating system or several file systems.
&os2;'s Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows you to create, delete, and edit volumes and partitions. Use LVM also to assign a drive letter to a volume and thus make it a drive or to hide a volume from &os2;. See "Introduction to LVM" for details. See "Using LVM" for details.

There are several options to start LVM:

For related information, select from the list below: