Two questions:
1) in WHS, the shared directories, can be accessed from a remote desktop login into WHS (a 2k3 server). I have read a couple things that make me think accessing these directories directly, and not through the shares WHS provides to the connected machines
is bad. Is that true? will I mess things up if I log into the WHS machine and move stuff around? It's be much much faster than doing it all over the networks (moving directory entries is much faster than reading every byte of data across a network cable, and
then writing every byte back to a new location).
2) I'm going to ask a question that has been answered, but I am hoping to have a slightly different angle on it. I want to dual boot my system. I want to be able to run the old XP install, which has similar software, should a newer one fail. Now, I know
WHS (rather stupidly, imo) erases everything on the system when you install it, so if I unplug the 1 XP HD, and install WHS, I can plug back in the XP drive, and tell the WHS OS to ignore the drive (don't mount it, and don't add it to the storage conglomeration).
Now, XP will dual boot, so I am hoping I can go into the boot partition settings (which I need to manually edit anyways, to erase a Win7 Beta install that doesn't exist any more) and manually add the WHS volume, so the XP boot controls which partition get's
to run. And again, I tell the XP partition to ignore all the WHS drives, so it doesn't fiddle with any of the shadow copies or whatever else is on there.
Maybe the Win7 boot loader can better handle XP or Win7 with WHS? Maybe it knows enough to get a Server2k3 install to dual boot with Win7? Or perhaps a Linux boot loader?
If nothing else, I can just unplug the XP drive unless I need it, but I would think someone out there would have hacked WHS/Server2k3 by now, so it was tolerant of a secondary OS.
And no, I'm not going to run WHS in a virtual machine. I've got one on my Win7 laptop to run Platform Builder, and it's operation is slow, does not have the snappy response that the main OS has, and is, in general, ... mushy (I can't think of a better word
for it). Network access in particular is poor and unreliable - and if WHS has a poor network setup, it's useless.
