Servers - New Sales41

I decided to put this tab in because I keep seeing so many bad answers to simple questions I thought I'd add my 2 cents anyway.

Do Any of This at Your Own RISK!!!

RESIZE BOOT PARTITION ON WIDOWS HOME SERVER
One thing I keep reading about is the problems with resizing the boot partition on Windows Home Server the original one, although I believe the same problem exists on the newer one Windows Home Server 2011.  The point to all this is that I keep reading about buying some partitioning software and stopping during the installation and putting this CD in and repartitioning and then continuing with the install except that now it reports the wrong size on the partition.  
Well you can do that if you want, but I've had a trick I've used forever and it works really good and you can do it after the fact when you've been running the server for a while and now found out you don't have enough room.  Originally I first tried this with good old NT4 both workstation and server.  Does anyone remember how you had to start in FAT32 with that and you couldn't allocate over 2 gigabytes of disk space, that was it for your boot partition.  Then you would do the updates and get it to Service Pack 4 and sheezam you now had the sky as the limit.  Actually I think it was like 137 gig at that time, but still a ton after only having 2.  The problem was your boot partition was still 2 gig which meant you couldn't put much on it.  Well here's what I used to do back then and it still works today.  After I got to the NTFS system and updated it to Service Pack 4 I'd hang another drive on the system and then I'd run good old Norton ghost and bonce to the secondary drive and resize it as I did.  Say I had a 100 gig drive I'd put 20 for the boot and the rest for data.  Now we had some room to put some apps on the boot drive.  You could either now use the drive you bounced to or what I would often do is after I done it, is bonce it back to the original with the new partition sizes.

This works fine on Windows Home Server as well and it reports the right sizes after you're done.  What I usually do is make sure that I know which way I'm going based on either the size of the drives I'm using or by the names on the partitions.  The biggest danger you have is imaging the wrong way.  Let's suppose we have a Windows Home Server with a 500 gigabyte drive that has the 20 gig boot partition and is using the rest 480 gig nominally for the data partition.  Assuming you're only using a portion of the 480 gig for data let's say 200 gig.  So you have 280 gig extra to divide up however you want it, so let’s give the boot partition another 30 gig and leave 250 gig to grow on.  I'd bonce this over to a terabyte drive hung on with either the motherboards controller or a promise controller like we've mentioned on the other pages.  So do a disk to disk clone with ghost boot from a ghost floppy or cd or use Hiren's the older ones I think 10.6 was the last one that had ghost on it.  Ghost is plenty cheap you can get it Fry's on Sale for as low as $15 after rebates I've done it a couple of times to keep the latest version.  Anyway start the disk to disk and go into the partition size and type in the size you want in the first partition.  You will have to have some room to work and ghost autosizes so make sure you've got room.  You can reset the second partition first and make it big enough to hold the data from the original then go to the first partition and set it to the size you want.  After that go back to the second partition just type in a number greater than what's left on  the drive in the second partition and it will max it out for you.  Now let it do its job and image the disk.  After that's over you can then move to the larger disk if you want or disconnect the smaller disk and boot from the larger one to verify that it's all working and that your data is still there.  Or if you're cocky you can then re-ghost back and now put your stuff back on the source disk with the sizes you want.  When you start to run the disk to disk the other way with the 1 terabyte source and the 500 gig target you'll notice it defaults the partition to the new size that you set on the first disk to disk and it should set the second for all that's left if not adjust it to what you want on that disk so we should now have a 50 gig boot partition and a 450 gig data partition.  Now do the clone again and when you're done remove the other disk and reboot your machine it should have the right partition sizes indicated and the room you wanted and no data loss and you didn't have to try and do some crazy stuff during the install.  You could also use some other programs to do the imaging as well any that will let you resize during the process.  Ghost is one of the programs that will let you go from larger to smaller as long as there is enough space to hold the data you want to move.

Another program that will let you do this while you're still running the OS is Paragon Server Disk Manager that's the one for servers, but you can use the cheaper one if you use the disk cloning portion of the program and do the same process as I described with ghost.  You can probably do this with a dozen different programs as well, but I know that you can do it with ghost and it will work.  Because I've done it lots of times.

I've used this trick several times to change the size of partitions on raid arrays as well.  Just use a drive larger than the raid array and resize it on the way.  I’ve even changed the disks on the array to larger disks recreate the array then image back with the new setup.  I usually use another controller for the secondary drive.  First I install the drivers for it while the system is working then do the bonce and reboot the machine to the imaged drive to verify that all is well and then resize the array and bounce back.  

This works!  If you attempt to do this you are on your own I bear no responsibility for your inability to complete this task.  And once again don't ask for more detailed instructions if you can't get it from here you probably shouldn't even attempt it.