Hi,
I have read several posts in this newsgroup regarding the installation of
SQL to a partition other than C:. Also, I have been working with SQL long
enough to know there are some files that get installed to the system
partition regardless of where you tell the Setup program to put SQL.
My scenario: Running SQL 2K and want to install a (full - AS, IS, etc.)
named instance of SQL 2K5. System partition is down to 1.6 GB. Using the
GUI even if I direct all the components to be installed to the E: partition
(has 30+ GB of free space) according to the Disk Cost feature I will be down
to about 95 MB of free space on the system partition.
I did some poking around and ran across the "template.ini" file and am now
wondering whether or not running an unattended install using this file will
produce my desired results. What I mean is, if I run an unattended install
of SQL and use "E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server" as the value for the
INSTALLSQLDIR and INSTALLSQLSHAREDDIR parameters, will I still end up with
only 95MB of free space on my system partition???
Thanks!@

Hi Barry,

I installed an instance on a clean machine, i.e. no SQL Server installed
before. Despite specifying my E drive as the destination for everything
you could set a destination for, SQL Server setup still installed a
considerable amount of data on the system partition. In other words
there is no way you can avoid this.

However do you really want to have a production system which has so
little space left on its system partition (yes 1.6GB is in my opinion
too little)?

Jonathan


Barry wrote:
> Hi,
> I have read several posts in this newsgroup regarding the installation of
> SQL to a partition other than C:. Also, I have been working with SQL long
> enough to know there are some files that get installed to the system
> partition regardless of where you tell the Setup program to put SQL.
> My scenario: Running SQL 2K and want to install a (full - AS, IS, etc.)
> named instance of SQL 2K5. System partition is down to 1.6 GB. Using the
> GUI even if I direct all the components to be installed to the E: partition
> (has 30+ GB of free space) according to the Disk Cost feature I will be down
> to about 95 MB of free space on the system partition.
> I did some poking around and ran across the "template.ini" file and am now
> wondering whether or not running an unattended install using this file will
> produce my desired results. What I mean is, if I run an unattended install
> of SQL and use "E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server" as the value for the
> INSTALLSQLDIR and INSTALLSQLSHAREDDIR parameters, will I still end up with
> only 95MB of free space on my system partition???
> Thanks!@

Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
When I have the time I want to try doing an unattended install (testing on a
sandbox Server) and see what happens.
As for the shortage of space on the system partition, this is not my
doing...I pointed this fact out to our development group.

"JPD" wrote:

> Hi Barry,
>
> I installed an instance on a clean machine, i.e. no SQL Server installed
> before. Despite specifying my E drive as the destination for everything
> you could set a destination for, SQL Server setup still installed a
> considerable amount of data on the system partition. In other words
> there is no way you can avoid this.
>
> However do you really want to have a production system which has so
> little space left on its system partition (yes 1.6GB is in my opinion
> too little)?
>
> Jonathan