Formatting Disks

In this example we will be working with a single 80 GB volume. Most likely in a production environment you will be storing your database on mirrored storage and/or a SAN. Ideally, it is best to store the OS and the data files on separate physical disks. However, in this example we will simply separate them by creating partitions.

Below are the partitions that will be used in this build. These sizes are for illustration purposes. The actual sizes will vary depending on the intended use of the database.

• C – Windows – 14 GB
  
• G – Data – 16 GB
  
• H – Backups – 32 GB
  
• L – Logs – 12 GB
  
• Z – Apps – 6 GB
  

Enter 14000 and press Enter

We will leave the rest of the disk unformatted for now, and use disk manager to create the rest of the partitions after the OS is installed. Press Enter to instal Windows on this partition.

After Windows is installed Right Click on My Computer and select Manage. Then click on Disk Management.

Right click on the available part of the disk to create the first partition.

For the first drive (G drive) we will create a primary partition

Enter the size for the g drive

Select drive letter

Leave defaults, enter drive label

Since we only have one disk in this example, and Windows only allows up to 4 primary partitions per disk, we will need to use an extended partition and create logical drives for the H and the L.

Right click on the available disk space and select New partition. This time choose extended partition

Assign enough space to cover the H (backups) and the L (logs) drives. In this case 44 GB.

After the extended partition is created, right click on it and create the two logical partitions on top of it.

Use the remaining space for the Z (apps) drive.

When finished you should have the following drives in My Computer

After formatting the drives, we will run windows update to make sure we have all the latest patches. Open the browser and goto windowsupdate.microsoft.com and follow prompts to update system.