Installing SBS 2011 Essentials on ML110 G7

[pfgpns]

I've just purchased and am trying to install Small Business Server 2011 Essentials on a new ML110 G7.  I've downloaded and am using the latest SmartStart 8.70 (b) CD.  I have a retail SBS 2011 install DVD.

I get through the whole SmartStart part just fine, and during that I tell it to use the maximum size disk partition, and after it reboots and starts the Windows setup it dies almost immediately with an error about Windows not being able to create a partition on disk 0, while applying the unattended answer file's <DiskConfiguration> setting.  Error code 0x80004005.

I click OK on the error and the setup then just dies and leaves me at a command prompt window.

I looked on the C: drive and I do see the autounattend.xml file and opened it in Notepad and sure enought it's got a section under <DiskConfiguration> trying to create a partition, then something trying modify 3 different partions.

Using Diskpart I can see that the hard drive has 2 partitions already on it, a small 100 MB partition and a large partition for what I'm pretty sure is the entire rest of the drive.  As I said, during the SmartStart part, I did select the "Maximum" option for the disk partition size.

So since I selected the Maximum size during SmartStart, I'm assuming the drive is already fully partitioned so why would the autounattend.xml be trying to create yet a 3rd partition?  (I'm assuming SmartStart created this autounattend.xml to pass on to Windows Setup, but I could be wrong.)

I did see an advisory out about the original SmartStart 8.7 installing SBS 2011 onto one large partition which is against how SBS 2011 normally installs if you install directly from the SBS 2011 media not using SmartStart, but I'm okay with it all being one partition.

I wonder if the error I'm seeing was an attemp in the (b) revision of SmartStart 8.70 (b) to get the SBS 2011 install to install on 2 partitions, but they neglected to account for what happens when someone actually does select the "Maximum" option in SmartStart and stop it from trying to create the additional partition.

Any ideas on how to resolve this?  I guess I could start over and try selecting a smaller partition size for the OS and see what happens, but I kind of actually want it to be on one big partition.

[wimb]

I have the same problem here. Have you found a solution?

[Goutham_Sabala]

Are you installing the SBS 2011 on a partition greater than 2TB?

[Cory Hug]

I'm the original poster (not sure how/when I signed up for a different forum account to post the original message, but this is me).  I never solved it.  And no, the hard drive is not over 2 TB.  It's 1 TB (three 500 GB drives in a RAID 5).

I decided to go back and reinstall again and select the size for the partition during the SmartStart process rather than just selecting the "maximum" option.  This worked, and created the 2 partitions as SBS 2011 Essentials normally expects.

So it looks to me like there is indeed a bug in the SmartStart 8.70 rev B automatic setup where if a user selects the "maximum" option, SmartStart still tries to create yet another partition when it shouldn't be.  It looks to me like in trying to resolve the advisory notice from the original SmartStart 8.70 where it always installed SBS onto a single partition, they flipped it around and assumed that everyone would want to do it that way and didn't account for the possibility that someone might still want to install it on one big partition.

The other thing I didn't like about the SmartStart setup though even when I let it install in 2 partitions, the 2nd partition ended up as drive E: instead of D:.  It saw the DVD-ROM drive in the server as D: and didn't rearrange things to make the second hard drive D: and move the DVD-ROM to E:.  The normal SBS 2011 Essentials will install properly that way (2nd partition as D:) if you install directly from the Microsoft install media.

So bottom line is that with SmartStart 8.70 rev B when installing SBS 2011 Essentials, you MUST install it with 2 partitions and do not select the "maximum" option for the partition size during the SmartStart phase.  And then if you want your 2nd partition back to D: (so the hard drive partition drive letters are contiguous) you'll have to move that manually after the install finishes.  (You can't just change the drive letter in the Disk Manager though, there are other things you have to do to get SBS 2011 Essentials to recognize the new drive letter as it's location for the directories it handles automatically through the wizards.)

I just checked and I don't see another updated (like rev C) version of SmartStart 8.70 so we're probably stuck with it this way.

[Dennis Handly]

>You can't just change the drive letter in the Disk Manager though,

Could you change the driver letter of your DVD-ROM BEFORE you start?

[Cory Hug]

No that I know of.  Remember, you're booting from the SmartStart CD so it's not like you have any control over any those types of things once it actually installs and boots into the Windows server OS.  Unless somebody from HP that knows the operations of SmartStart in detail can respond and tell us a way.