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August 27th, 2008 23:00
Creating partition on DELL VIRTUAL DISK, RAID 1 to add additional OS
I just added a PowerEdge SC1430, with a pair of 750 GB 7.2 SATA drives configured as a single RAID 1 drive (as a Dell Virtual Disk) running Windows Server 2003 R2. I've discovered that I need to partition this server to install Windows 2000 Server as well, to migrate an application to the W2k3 environment. Windows thinks it is a single "basic" disk but I have read that Dell Virtual Disks are "dynamic". Is this true and does it matter?
I am intending to use DISKPART to create the partition in which I will install Windows 2000 and need to know if this will work correctly. I am not planning on using any additional (3rd-party) software.
Am I making any mistakes here? Is there documentation someone could point me; I've been searching the web for a few days now and can't find anything really clear on these issue.
Thanks for any assistance!
- Simon.
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August 28th, 2008 12:00
Other than that:
- you can't shrink partitions unless you are either running Windows 2008 or buy a 3rd party partition management application (e.g. Acronis Disk Director for Servers)
- I'm not sure Windows 2000 can boot to a partition that starts behind the "32GB" point on a harddrive. Older OSes couldn't, XP can, but I'm not sure if Windows 2000 can.
- dual booting 2 (server) OSes can be tricky as you would want the OSes not to see each others partitions or they may decide that something in there needs 'fixing' and it could break the other OS. To do this in a safer way, look into a boot loader. I personally (at home) usually use the one that comes with Partition Magic.
Instead of messing with this, have you considered just downloading VMware server (free) and install this on the 2003 server and then run Windows 2000 in a virtual machine? This may be a whole lot easier.
If you still want to do a dual boot, here is some info.
What this means is that you may need to wipe the drive, then set up the boot manager (the one with partition magic needs to be installed in a FAT partition, so I usually make a little 32MB (not GB) FAT16 partition, make it dos bootable, copy boot magic to it, go into the program and enable it (set the 32MB partition to be the primary choice). Now you install Windows 2000 on a 20GB partition (C-drive). Leave the rest of the disk unused.
The Windows 2000 install will break the boot manager, but what you do is boot to a dos floppy with fdisk on it. At the command prompt type fdisk and use the option to select which partition to set active. Make the little 32MB partition active. Now you reboot. At the C-prompt, go to the boot manager utility and add the Windows 2000 partition as a boot choice. Also set the Windows 2000 partition as hidden for now.
Now you boot to the Windows 2003 CD and install that on a next partition (say 40GB). After this, perform the same 'fix' to re-enable the boot manager and then add the Windows 2003 partition to the boot manager.
Now you can dual boot between the OSes. Make an extended partition for the remainder of the harddrive and create a logical drive in there. This way both OSes can access the rest of the drive.
mayeski
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August 28th, 2008 17:00
Thanks for your quick response.
It looks like I'd be crazy to not try the VMware solution first, at least, so I'll give it a try.
Can't find now where exactly I did "learn" that Dell Virtual Disks were dynamic; perhaps it was WRT to operating without a raid controller - didn't think that was even possibly but what do I know - I'm a software developer/DBA mostly now, doing hardware only when I have to, like now .
- Simon.