new server arrives!

[atomiser]

woo hoo! some of you guys have been sooooo helpful over the past few months, and for that i thank you a million times! i specced a new server for a customer a couple of months back with your help (can't link to the thread because the search function appears to be down) and today it arrived!

it's a poweredge 2900 with a single 2.5ghz quad-core cpu, 4 gigs of ram, 6x 74gb 15k sas drives, remote management card, twin psu, rd1000 backup drive and 3x 300GB cartridges. oh, and sbs 2003 standard too. chuffed to bits with it, as im sure my customer is going to be too!

a quick question... it's come pre-installed with two drives in raid1 and four drives in raid 5, and sbs 2003 is already pre-installed too. the partitions are a bit crappy though. when it comes to re-installing these things from scratch, do you go with the option of using the bootable systems management dvd to prep the system, or do you prefer to just boot from the first o/s cd and do everything manually?

look forward to your feedback guys! cheers, once again!

 

[Zlash]

You'll need to boot from the dell open manage DVD or you won't have raid drivers if you just try to boot from the OS disc. And if you want to change the raid config you'll have to do that through open manage before you install the OS or go into the raid bios during bootup.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

How are the partitions odd? The RAID 1...most likely a single volume..just leave the OS installed to that. Move the Exchange infostore to the RAID 5 array..which is most likely a single volume...and the users shared folders, incoming fax folder if you'll use that, and the general shares.

 

[atomiser]

the raid1 was split three ways, fourtunately the raid5 was as one large partition. i wanted to re-install from scratch anyway as i need the practice! raid1 is now one nice large partition the same as the raid5. i used the bootable dell dvd to kick off the installation - installed the first cd to the raid1 partition and then shifted everything onward from that onto the raid5 partition as advised on here, now just finishing up putting the r2 stuff on. this box has some serious poke! looking forward to using the rd1000 that has come with it too!