First of all, remember that Windows 2008 has an "especial" folder, called Winsxs, that can grow very big (usually 6-10 GB). I recomend a SO partition not less than 40 GB.
I'm supposing that the server is a real server hardware with two or more disks on raid 1 for the SO partition (standard build), if not, it will be more tricky to do the job.
Updated after reading your info
Last Idea
Check a BartPE or Windows PE Start CD with a partition software installed on it BartPE you can check the info. I remember have used it with a ghost installed to:
- Cloning the Disk out after defragmenting and checking all the options
- Resize the Virtual Disk
- Restore the Image to a less partition (but big enought to hold the Image and some free space)
Maybe this option fits your needs.
Please mantain us updated. We all have cheap dell servers elsewhere :)
End update
What I have done in the past:
- Defrag the So partition with a defragmenter (windows one can be enough)
- Remove one disk from raid, in the worst case, you have a working SO in that disk
- Use Gparted, a Live ISO, run it from CD, load the Raid Drivers if necessary and reduce the SO partition to your needs.
- Start the SO, check and if all is OK, put the Disk on again to rebuild.
If anything goes wrong, shutdown, remove the online disk, put the disk backup, start the SO, check and put the disk to rebuild.
I like this system because you have an easy backup to restore without external software or media and in no-time.
Observation In case that you haven't raid, Gparted can do the same work, but you will need to make a Backup from the system in an extenal media. It can work on Virtual Machines too... A must have in my opinion.
Hope this helps.
I had similar problem with one XP on RAID, which broke during conversion to virtual machine. It got stuck on acpitabl.dat.
What I did to fix it was to boot with Windows 2012 CD opened the console with Shift+F10 and ran chkdsk /f c:. After this, the machine was able to boot normally.
Best Answer
if you have a full backup from sbs 2003 using the sbs wizard, it will be in bkf format. then you need to install a vanilla flavour of sbs 2003 with the exact service pack as when you took the backup. once you do the initial install you then need to go into dir services restore mode and choose to install or restore the c drive and the system state. If you have more than one partition i would probably suggest, or i normally do this when trying to test recovery processes, holding off on the other data restore, you can do that later.
please reply to whether you did the above? thanks.gd