[WinMac] NT4 Boot volume [was:Re: Mac OS 8.6]

Daniel L. Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:05:57 -0500

        Chris:

        Please see below...

At 09:02 AM 5/28/99 -0500, Chris wrote:
>
>In a message dated 5/26/99 10:56:27 PM, pata@tampabay.rr.com writes:
>
>>> Hmmm, let's see: I didn't have to reinstall any drivers when
>installing
>>>NT4's Service Pack 2, 3, 4, & 5
>>
>>Well, SP5 just killed my brand new install of NT workstation 4. Of course
>>I was very trusting (stupid) and didn't backup before installing but I
>>figured, what the heck I've just reformated the hard drive and am using
>>an NTFS partition so I should be ok. Turns out I have to use 98 for a
>>while until I find the time to reformat and reinstall everything again.
>>And that's not the only machine in our network that SP5 has killed.
>>
>>I've never had such a severe problem with any Mac I've dealt with when
>>updating OSs.
>
>here's another one for you.
>
>We had the LAN Support group from OIT (Office of Instructional Technology
>here at UMass) come over today and upgrade our server (a dual everything
>Compaq) to SP4 (have to have some of that stuff for Y2K compliance -- um,
>let's see, which Mac OS do we have to upgrade to for Y2K?). Anyway, the
>reason it took so long was that if you have an NTFS boot volume over 7.8G
>(FAT is ok), your boot blocks can get mangled by SP4. So they Ghosted the
>server (just in case), ran Partition Magic to cut down the boot partition
>(this took forever), and finally did the SP4 upgrade. If they hadn't done
>this a mess of times on other servers, they never would have known why SP4
>kept trashing big servers.

        [Tru64 Unix stuff clipped]

        Chris: The problem was in the original setup of the servers.
Just like a
Mac, you don't want the boot volume to be too big - 1 gig is *more* than
plenty. In fact, unless you are storing photos or multimedia you'll want to
break up your server volumes into 2 to 4 gig chunks, to speed access. [Some
experts recommend 1 to 2 gigs, but I prefer to use 4096 byte cluster sizes
and go to the 2 to 4 gig range.]

        In any case, ask yourself this question: Why do I need a boot
volume on a
server 2 gigs or bigger? You can easily move the spool files and paging
files elsewhere. Furthermore, by isolating your boot volume from other,
shared, volumes you enhance security - It's harder to krack into the
%SystemRoot%\WINNT directory.

        On the Mac side, I always break a larger (>2 gig) drive into
2 volumes -
This way, when it crashes only one volume (usually) gets hosed. This makes
it a LOT easier to recover, as the (HFS or HFS+) file system structure has
far fewer files to keep track of.

>Chris Hoogendyk
>Network Specialist
>UMass Library, Amherst

        Cheers!
        Dan

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