SMB MVP Logo

Today I travel to Greensboro, North Carolina to assist with the SMB/MVP Community Roadshow event that will take place tonight.

This is a true grassroots effort by the Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) MVPs to take to the road and talk to I.T. pros about the solutions that are available to small/medium size businesses. Our goal is to put on these seminars in the United States, in Canada, in Australia and in Europe.

Tonight’s session will be led by Amy Babinchak (Michigan) and Cliff Galiher (Montana).

On all my SBS 2008 servers, I install the following script (batch) file to stop Exchange and add it as a shortcut to my SBS console desktop .

Why?

Because when you need to reboot your SBS server, we have seen that stopping Exchange manually cause your server shutdown and restart process to run faster than if you do not first stop Exchange. Philip Elder’s blog post on the subject shows some timings that he did.

Here’s the script. Simply copy and paste it into Notepad and save it as a .bat file. One note: to run this batch file, you must right click on it and select ‘Run as Administrator’. even if you are logged on with admnistrator access.

net stop msexchangeadtopology /y
net stop msftesql-exchange /y
net stop msexchangeis /y
net stop msexchangesa /y
net stop iisadmin /y

Let’s say you want to install Microsoft Windows on a computer, but the computer has no CD/DVD drive. Can you say “Netbook”?

Or, in the case of SBS 2011, the downloadable .iso file is +6GB in size, which means you are not going to burn this to a standard DVD drive; you will need a newer double layer DVD drive, and double layer media!

A better alternative is to put your iso image onto a bootable USB drive. Most newer workstaitons and servers all support booting from a USB drive. On Dell computers, you can usually press F12 at power up time to select the device you wish to boot from. I’m sure there are tons of web sites telling you how to do this, but I’m posting it here so I can find it in the future. (And a tip of the hat to Mikael Nystrom from the instructions!)

One note before you being: if your target system is 64 bit, then you need to do these instructions from a 64 bit computer; likewise you need to do these steps from a 32 bit computer if your target system is 32 bit.

How to create a bootable USB Stick

1. Insert USB stick in Win7/2008R2 box
2. Start – Run – CMD 
3. DISKPART 
4. List Disk (notice the number of the your USB stick) 
5. Sel Disk 5 (if the number was 5) 
6. Clean (will erase the disk) 
7. Cre Part Pri (will create a primary partition) 
8. Sel Part 1 (select the partition just created)
9. Active (will make it active) 
10. Format FS=NTFS QUICK (will format the drive) 
11. Assign (will give it a drive letter) 
12. Exit (will close Diskpart)

Now you have a bootable USB stick, the only thing you need to is a bootmgr and a OS, easiest way is to insert the normal OS install DVD and xcopy DVD:\ to USB:\ /s Done