Upgrades Compared with New Installations

   

This section compares upgrading with performing a new installation to help you decide whether to perform a new installation. (See Chapter 16 , "Upgrading from Windows NT 4.0 Server," and Chapter 17 , "Upgrading from Windows 2000 Server," for more information about upgrading.) Upgrading is either replacing Windows NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 5 or later) with a product in the Windows Server 2003 family or replacing Windows 2000 with a product in the Windows Server 2003Server 2003 family. Installing, in contrast with upgrading, means completely removing the previous operating system or installing a product in the Windows Server 2003 family on a disk or disk partition with no previous operating system.

Upgrade Considerations

The following list contains some points to consider when doing an upgrade:

  • With an upgrade, configuration is simpler, and your existing users, settings, groups, rights, and permissions are retained.

  • With an upgrade, you do not need to reinstall files and applications. As with any major changes to the hard disk, however, it is recommended that you back up the disk before beginning an upgrade.

  • If you want to upgrade and then use the same applications as before, be sure to review application information in Relnotes.htm (in the \Docs folder on the Setup CD). Also, for the most recent information on compatible applications for products in the Windows Server 2003 family, see the software compatibility information in the Windows Catalog at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/catalog/.

New Installation Considerations

The following list contains some points to consider when doing clean installations:

  • If you reformat your hard disk and then perform a new installation, the efficiency of your disk might improve (compared with not reformatting it). Reformatting also gives you the opportunity to modify the size or number of disk partitions to make them match your requirements more closely.

  • If you want to practice careful configuration management, such as on a server where high availability is important, you might want to perform a new installation on that server instead of an upgrade. This is especially true on servers on which the operating system has been upgraded several times in the past.

  • It's possible to install Windows Server 2003 and also allow the computer to sometimes run another operating system. Setting up the computer this way, however, presents complexities because of file system issues. For more information, see "Installing Multiple Operating Systems" later in this chapter.

  • If you want to install Windows Server 2003 on a computer that previously ran an operating system released before Windows 2000, note theServer 2003 following:

    • Do not upgrade to or install Windows Server 2003 on a compressed drive unless the drive was compressed with the NTFS file system compression utility. Uncompress a DriveSpace or DoubleSpace volume before running Setup on it.

    • If you used Windows NT 4.0 to create a volume set, mirror set, stripe set, or stripe set with parity and you want to run Setup for Windows Server 2003 on that computer, you must prepare the disk set first. For details, see "Working with Volumes, Mirrors, and Stripes" later in this chapter.


   
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Introducing Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Introducing Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003
ISBN: 0735615705
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 153

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