Archive for January, 2009

Jan

2009

How to: In-Place Upgrade from Windows Server 2003 Domain Controller to Windows Server 2008

In this article we are going to upgrade our Windows 2003 Domain Controller to a Windows 2008 Domain Controller by performing an in-place upgrade.

First i’ve build an clean Windows 2003 x64 Server and promoted the server to a new domain controller of upgrade.local.
(note: if you want to upgrade your Windows 2000 Domain Controller to Windows 2008, you’ve first have to do an in-place upgrade to Windows 2003!)

Note: make sure you’ve at least 14000 Mb (14 Gb) free space available on your system partition.

Now place the Windows 2008 DVD in your computer, or mount it in your virtual environment.

Browse to your DVD player (in my environment it’s D:) and go to the following folder D:\sources\adprep.

First we’re going to prepare our forest with the following command: adprep /forestprep. After this command, we’re going to prepare our domain: adprep /domainprep.

Posted in Microsoft Windows 2008 Server | No Comments »

Jan

2009

How to: Extend VMDK in VMware Workstation

Today I was testing in my virtual test environment. On one server the system partition was out of space, so I had to extend the VMDK file, so there’ll be some more space available.

With the following steps, you can extend your VMDK file.

- Open the commandline (Start, Run, CMD)
- Browe to the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe
- Give the new size of the VMDK file with the parameter -x
- Browse to the VMDK file you want to extend

So, for example, the full command would be:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 40Gb D:\VM\INPLACEUPGRADE\INPLACEUPGRADE.vmdk
(Note: after the parameter X, give the total new size of the VMDK file. So when your VMDK was 10 Gb, you want to extend with 30 Gb, you type in 40 Gb)

The next step is to make the system partition bigger. I’ll use Gparted Live. Mount the ISO, boot from it, and within three steps the partition grown to 40 Gb.