Installing two hard drives

[Geek4u 0]

Bought a new 200GB hard drive and using my old 100GB hard drive as a second drive in my system. The new drive will be the master and the older one slave. Both drives will be formatted and partitioned with one partition each. I'm installing Windows Server 2003 Enterprise using NTFS file system on the master drive. During installation, will I be asked about the second drive so I can make it NTFS too?

[AndyFair 0]

No, Server2003 install (in fact, any Windows install) will only format the drive/partition that it is installing itself onto - you'll need to set up the other drives and partitions using disk mangler once the install is complete.

 

I would also recommend partitioning the drives to keep your OS/applications and data separate - that way, if you need to reinstall for any reason, you won't have to lose all your data too. Besides, Windows doesn't need anywhere near 200Gb!

 

Rgds

AndyF

[thatsteveguy 0]

Originally posted by AndyFair:

Quote:

Besides, Windows doesn't need anywhere near 200Gb!

 

Rgds

AndyF

 

Yet!

lol

S

 

[Geek4u 0]

Thanks AndyFair.

 

By, "set up the other drives and partitions using disk mangler," you mean a program like Norton Partition Magic 8.0? I also want to run Ghost 9.0 on the server for backup purposes as well.

[AndyFair 0]

Sorry, by "disk mangler", I mean the Disk Management portion of the Computer Management applet (I remember the early days of NT, when Disk Manager was an awful app, and would mess up your disks more often than not - hence it used to be knows as "disk mangler" - thankfully, Disk Management now "does what it says on the tin")

 

To get to Disk Management, select "Computer Management" from the Administrative Tools section on the Start Menu, then select Disk Management from the tree on the left.

This will allow you to partition your drives, format them, assign letters, span them etc.

 

There's no reason to use Partition Magic unless you want to resize "live" partitions.

 

If you're using Ghost, that's another reason to have smaller partitions rather than one huge one.

 

Hope this helps

 

Rgds

AndyF

[Geek4u 0]

Hey, Thanks again Andy.

 

Was thinking about using Partition Magic to divide the 200 drive in two and place OS/Applications on one side and the data files on the other as you suggested and then use the second 100 drive as additional failsafe backup of the data files as well. I know, paranoid. Stop laughing.

 

I guess I'll divide the 200 during Server '03 Installation and then once the OS is up, use Disk Management to format the second drive.