Upgrading to Server 2008 - Bump...

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Hi all.

I know sod-all about servers.
Don't get me wrong, I like them and I can fiddle around with them a bit. I've done a couple of installs of 2003 and SQL 2000, but they were pretty straight forward 'put in disk and click next'.

It doesn't take much to go wrong to rub me up the wrong way pretty quickly.

Anyway, I've come by a pretty tidy piece of kit and have decided to have a little play to get my hand in a bit. The server is a fairly new Dell Poweredge 2900. It's running 2003 R2 x64 Standard at the moment. All is pretty calm at the moment and we're on talking terms.

I quite fancy putting 2008 on there for s**ts and giggles.

I've got a DVD ISO from Technet so we're ready to go. First problem is there's no DVD drive. Not impossible to fix, I've been playing around with MagicISO and CloneDVD and I think we can do something there by creating a virtual drive.

I've had a go and the install won't go through as an upgrade as there isn't enough room on the C: partition - it's set to 20GB at the moment and there isn't a lot I can free up. There's a 537GB data partition too.

I don't really want to spend money on tools to do any re-partitioning so I was wondering if I should try a complete re-install. There's nothing I want to keep on the server.

Any suggestions, tips or advice would be much appreciated...

 

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For a server, for best practices I would do a fresh install... because you don't want to carry over any issues you might have. In a production environment you would backup the data install on a new seperate server, migrate services if needed, etc.. then restore the data, test your server and then you can go live.

But in this case if you don't care about the data than I would recommend a re-install.

 

get a USB DVD drive or a USB key to put the image on (there are instructions for that somewhere)
i wouldnt try it with a virtual DVD as im not sure how the OS will handle loosing the drive at the first reboot, depends if its already copied ALL contents to local storage


try gparted for repartitioning

and yeah, if you want to practice an upgrade, do one, otherwise rebuild

 

That's kind of what was worrying me.
I've been reading that it should be OK for an upgrade, but a bit concerned about a fresh install.

Cheers!

 

Just to add as an option:

You can also use WDS to deploy Win 2008 image over the network. You can configure disk partitioning in Unattend.xml (is this the one?)

 

Cheers.

This is a stand alone machine for messing with...

 

If it's the server I am thinking of have you checked if the RD1000 is bootable?

Gonna cost a fortune to run and warm up quickly to mate!

 

Ha ha!
It may well be mate.

I could have saved money on recovering the admin password by asking you to see if A.B. still had it on a piece of bog paper in his pocket.

Happy days...

 

ah ha!

yes, you could! lol.

 

Got it for a good price...

Anyway, was just worried about using the RD1000 for a fresh install in case the drivers spackered up half way through.

 

Creating a bootable USB drive is easy however I would suggest just using the Windows 7 USB Tool from MS. It will do everything you want it to.

Alternatively you can just open up Diskpart and do it yourself.

Now simply copy the contents of the DVD to the USB key and it will bootup and install Win2008 for you.

 

Cheers Simon.

I'll give that a try.