> From: John Beckett 
> Ellen K  wrote in message
> news::
>> 2 drives as a mirrored pair - boot partition goes here and another drive
> letter
>> for the transaction log
> Is there a reason for two partitions? It's handy to separate the system
> files from your data, but there is no good reason to have two partitions
> on the one physical drive.

Company standard is that the boot partition is its own partition.

>> currently the boot partition is only 4 GB and the NT admin says it HAS to
>> have a swap file of at least 1.2 GB
> 4GB is a bit mean, although ok with NT4. I see later in your message that
> the admin wants 8GB - a good idea. Uh oh - I see in another message that
> it is Windows 2000 - 4GB is very bad.
> You don't really HAVE to have a swap file on the boot partition. That is,
> you could move the 1.2GB swap file to another drive.

Actually the swap file is 2 GB; what he said was that he couldn't reduce it
below 1.2.

> Presumably you have 1GB of RAM so your swap file is supposed to be that
> size or a bit more. If you don't have the swap file on the boot partition,
> and if the operating system crashes but is healthy enough to dump RAM, it
> wants to dump the RAM to the swap file. However, in that scenario, the
> swap file must be on the boot partition. So, the penalty for having the
> swap file on another drive is that you can't get a memory dump after a
> crash. Most people have decided that this is not a real problem and are
> quite happy - what would you do with a 1.2GB memory dump anyway?

Yes there was only 1 GB of RAM, no idea how that happened, he made a
transplant last night and how it has 3, so that should already help.  

Given enough room, sure, I would like the memory dump.

>> I asked whether we could replace the two 18's in the mirrored pair with 36's
>> and he freaked.
> I can understand why. Any change like this could have devastating side
> effects. It might be very simple, largely depending on the capabilities of
> your RAID system. I think you need to ask  the RAID vendor. However, you
> would need one of those magic partition-expanding programs to take
> advantage of the extra space from the larger drive.

We do have one of those, we used it once before in a somewhat different
situation... added another physical drive to a RAID5 array and then
expanded the boot partition.   (That was a box from before I got here and
the database
on it is the back end to a purchased application...)

>> if we do this we will screw up anything with the other 4 disks.
> Probably not!

That is encouraging, thanks.  :)

> John

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