Lesson 2: Installing Windows Vista

19

The Where Do You Want To Install Windows page shows a list of all disks and partitions avail-

able on the computer. From this page, you can load a driver for a disk drive if one is not already

included with Windows. This is often necessary only with special high performance disks or

redundant array of independent disks (RAID) arrays. If your hard disk drive is not visible

when you reach this part of the installation routine, you need to install the appropriate hard

disk driver.

MORE INFO RAID: redundant array of inexpensive disks

Although Windows Vista supports software RAID, some high performance workstation computers

use a hardware RAID array. A hardware RAID array ties multiple identical disks together to increase

performance and reliability. In some cases, you might need to load a hardware driver for Windows

Vista’s installation routine to recognize the RAID array as a valid disk. You can find out more about

RAID by referring to the following webpage: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues

/2005/05/RAID/

Clicking Drive Options (Advanced) brings up tools, shown in Figure 1-7, that you can use to

create a new partition, format, extend a partition across multiple disks, or load a driver. It is

not necessary to use the advanced drive options unless you want to create multipleseparate

partitions. Extending volumes across partitions and disks is beyond the scope of the 70-620

exam. Windows Vista automatically creates and formats a partition if you do not use any of the

advanced options.

Figure 1-7

Drive options

Generally speaking, you will want to allocate as much space as possible to the partition that

will host the Windows Vista volume. By default, all applications are installed onto the volume

that hosts Windows Vista. Most people do not delete applications that they have installed

unless they have to, which means that over time, the amount of disk space used on the volume