Creating a larger SYS (main) Partition in Windows Home Server (WHS)

Interesting first Blog, but I decided that I spend so much time figuring out how to do things I should share my findings with others. Therefore, here we are.

As you can guess I use Windows Home Server (WHS) (www.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver). It's a great piece of software and keeps my entire home network backed up with little to no thought. Currently I use my WHS machine for two uses. First it is obviously the backup sever for my home network. Secondly it is my MAME (mamedev.org)machine for a self built arcade (another blog posting one day??).

Yesterday I decided to install Windows SharePoint Services into my network and thought I should figure out how to install it on the WHS server (this will be yet another blog post). During my investigation on how to set this up, I found that the SYS drive that is created during the WHS install is only 20GB in size. This is VERY small if you are going to use the server for more than just WHS. So I started my search on what to do to make it larger. Here is what I found..

1) Growing the size of the SYS drive on an existing WHS install is not only unsupported, but, from what I have found, very unstable.
2) There is no way to grow the size of the SYS drive in any "supported" manner.
3) If you want to make the SYS drive larger, there is a "safe" way to do it, but only during the initial install of WHS.

Since the main reason was I doing this was to install Windows SharePoint Services on my WHS machine I thought a fresh install would be best anyway. In addition, my WHS server had been up and running for years now. A clean install is always nice.

You will need a couple of things to get this all to work
1) Your WHS install Disk
2) A bootable Partition Manager (I use Paragon Partition Manager running in BartPE).


Installing WHS happens in three distinct steps.
1) You boot from the WHS install media. This is where it asks you questions about “Clean Install” and warns you that it will delete ALL attached HDD’s, etc.
2) After a reboot there is a short install that looks very DOS based (no GUI). There is a progress bar showing the status of file copies.
3) Another reboot and then back to a GUI install.

We need to make our changes between steps 2 and 3. Therefore, start your install, but when the machine reboots and begins the non-GUI file copy, eject your WHS install media and replace it with your bootable Partition Manager disk. When the machine reboots you should find a 20GB partition and the rest of the disk as unallocated. 20GB is the default that WHS creates for the SYS drive. This is the partition you want to resize. I grew it to 50 GB. Since the rest of the disk is unallocated, the growth took seconds. Once completed, replace your bootable partition manager disk with the original WHS install disk and again reboot the machine.

If all went as planned you should see the machine boot into the Windows GUI and begin all the things needed to complete the WHS install.

Enjoy your larger SYS drive!