Windows Small Business Server 2011 : Working with Disks During Installation

Before you can store data on a Windows SBS 2011 hard disk, you must create at least one volume on it. You create your first volume, which becomes the C drive, during the operating system installation process, and Windows SBS 2011 uses that volume to store all the default system, application, and data files. Although it is possible to create additional simple volumes from within the setup program, many administrators wait until after the installation process is complete. You must also wait if you want to create non-simple volumes, such as mirror sets and RAID-5 arrays.

Loading Disk Drivers During Installation

The first opportunity that you have to manipulate the storage subsystem on a server running Windows SBS 2011 is during the installation of the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. When the Where Do You Want To Install Windows? page appears, as shown in Figure 1, it displays all the disks that the setup program was able to locate using the device drivers supplied with Windows.

Figure 1. The Where Do You Want To Install Windows? page of the Windows Server 2008 R2 setup program.

Windows Server 2008 R2 ships with a large collection of disk drivers, and if you purchase an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) version of Windows SBS 2011, that collection might be augmented with drivers for the specific hardware included in the computer. The result, in the majority of cases, is that you can see the disks in the computer during the installation without any special manipulation.

There are times when this is not the case, however. If the Where Do You Want To Install Windows? page should appear with some or all of the computer’s disks missing, this means that the system lacks the drivers it needs to access some or all of the storage subsystem.

If your computer has a drive or array that Windows does not support with its included drivers, you can at this point load additional drivers yourself by clicking the Drive options (advanced) link. The additional controls that appear, as shown in Figure 2, include a Load driver link that enables you to supply a CD, DVD, or flash drive containing driver files that you have obtained from the manufacturer of your hardware.

Figure 2. The additional controls on the Where Do You Want To Install Windows? page of the Windows Server 2008 R2 setup program.

Creating Volumes During Installation

By default, selecting a disk during the Windows Server 2008 R2 setup process causes the program to utilize the entire disk to create a small system volume and a C volume, on which it installs the entire Windows SBS 2011 environment.

However, the additional controls on the Where Do You Want To Install Windows? page also enable you to create your own volume for the installation, using only part of an existing disk. If, for example, your server has a single 500 gigabyte (GB) disk drive in it, you might want to create a 150 GB volume for the Windows SBS installation and save the rest for data storage you might need at a later time.

The main restriction on these volume controls is that you cannot create anything other than a simple volume during the Windows Server 2008 R2 installation. Therefore, you cannot create a mirrored, spanned, striped, or redundant array of independent disks (RAID) volume and use it for your Windows SBS 2011 installation. If you want to use these advanced volume types to protect your data, you must wait until the installation is complete, create the volume using the Disk Management snap-in or the Diskpart.exe utility, and then move your data to the protected volume.