Datasheet

INSTALLING SP1

Now, personally I have not experienced a single problem with 2003 SP1. Yes, I’ve run into trouble

with some NT 4 service packs, but not with any of the 2000, XP, or 2003 service packs, so I’m

inclined to trust SP1 and not bother with the backups. Notice, however, that the SP1 install wizard

doesn’t offer you the option not to back up, which is one reason why I don’t install SP1 with the GUI

much. Many of my clients like to create a small C: partition so that they can devote the rest of their

storage to separate drives for data, databases, logs, and the like. As a result, I’ve found that many

people have installed Server 2003 on C: drives as small as 4 GB. Now, understand please that I don’t

recommend

it, but people have done it because of reasons that made sense back in the NT 4 days.

Those folks soon find that 2003 has a much bigger appetite for disk space than 2000 or NT 4 did, and

so their systems can run into out-of-space problems, and skipping the pre-SP1-install backup saves

about 400MB of space. So if you find yourself applying SP1 to a system with less than, say, 2 GB or

so of free space on whatever drive contains the operating system, then I recommend that you skip

the GUI and look to the next section, where I’ll show you how to install SP1 without making

sp1.exe

back up a lot of files and thereby put your system in a free space squeeze. But if you’ve got

plenty of free space on your operating system’s partition and want to finish running the wizard,

then click Next and you’ll see something like Figure 1.5.

After a bit, SP1’s installed and the wizard offers you a Finish button. Click it, reboot your system,

and you’ve got SP1 installed.

Figure 1.4

Where to backup

for an uninstall?

Figure 1.5

SP1 installation

under way

56452.book Page 7 Wednesday, August 30, 2006 4:52 PM