Best Practices
Here is a quick checklist of the installation tips in this chapter:
- Verify that the system and all components are on the Hardware Compatibility List.
- Do a clean install, if possible.
- Verify that CPU speed, RAM, and storage meet minimum recommended requirements.
- Get current on all firmware, BIOS, and drivers.
- Use NTFS to format all server partitions.
- Mount disks in all removable media.
- Perform a bare installation first, then install additional services later.
- Use hardware RAID for best performance and fault tolerance.
- Use FDISK to delete all partitions on dynamic disks when doing a clean install. This converts them to basic disks.
- On multiboot machines, install each Windows product into its own partition.
- Purchase Windows Server 2003 and XP using Volume Purchase Agreements to avoid per-instance activation.
- For IA64 systems, ensure that you create the correct GPT partitions in the correct order.
- Remove all unnecessary peripherals if you have Setup problems.
- Improve performance by putting the paging file or files on a separate drive. Leave a small paging file on the boot drive for a stack heap dump (minidump).
- Get disk utilities that are certified to work with NTFS 5.1 and Windows Server 2003/XP.