Very slow upgrade from Windows Storage Server 2003 to 2008 R2 Standard

storage-serverwindows-server-2008

I've got a DPM 2007 server with 4TB storage… and since it's DPM there are many, many volumes on the disks when you view disk manager.

I've copied over an ISO of Server 2008 R2 and run an upgrade install. When the server reboots the screen shows "Upgrading Windows…" and stays there for a long time. I left it for 16 hours. Then I rebooted it and it happily booted back into Storage Server 2003.

I remember that when I did an inplace upgrade of a Vista laptop to Win7 it "processed" disk 2 even though the OS was on disk 1. Although in that case user data was redirected to disk 2.

Plus this isn't (I don't think) a supported upgrade path – although the setup didn't complain.

So hivemind… Am I being impatient or am I trying an upgrade doomed to fail?

Thanks

Paul

Best Answer

I think I've got it... I've just rebooted and let it roll back to Server 2003. The DPM managed volumes didn't previously have drive letters but 22 of them now do A-z less X for boot, and A:(floppy),B:(reserved for floppy I think),C: (cd-rom).

I guess the windows upgrade is enumerating the drives and trying to add drive letters where there were none and there are more than 26 drives so it hangs.

Ho hum straight build it is.

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