New Install W2k Server

Well, hard question to answer not knowing the plan(s) or have some idea of the setup for the entire network. Basic things like are you going to mirror the sever or strip the server? are you going to have other programs residing on W2K server such asExchange, ISA? SQL? SMS? Is the W2K server a PDC? BDC?

Essentially. Your free space won't total 35GB though because a 9GB drive won't really hold 9GB of data. When marketing, drive manufacturers use 1GB = 1,000MB. In actuality, 1GB = 1,024MB. Formatiing will also use some overhead. Therefore, you will probably end up with between 8.4 and 8.7GB of useable space per drive (depending on manufacturer).

Assuming you don't start loading down your C drive with numerous applications, a 4GB system partition should be plenty. On my AD server with a 4GB system partition, and running only those applications needed for the maintenance and management of the server, space used is less than 2.5GB.

Since you havne't said if you're running hardware raid or not. If you have hardware raid, I would setup a mirror of the first two drives, and raid 5 the last 4.

This gives your boot & system partition redundancy with the best writing speeding.
The last 4 drives will give you approximately 27GB of space with redundancy as well. This gives you better read speed and ok write speed. It all depends on the capabilities of your RAID card.

If you're going to use software raid, well you're going to take a hit in performance for the mirror, but it's usually negligible. For the raid5, doing it in software will give you a big performance hit, but it will give you redundancy.

I spend my life setting up Win2k Server and Pro for software developers and end users. First thing you need to know is Win2k does not have a partition limitation like Winnt 4.0. You should set up your server with NTFS partitions only. How many hard drives do you have ? Are you going to mirror the OS partition or raid it ? How big are each of the hard drives ? Which is the primary partition ? Do you use dynamic drives or basic drives ? I would set up my OS partition on the first primary partition/hard drive and make it big enough for my OS and applications that I am going to set up on the machine. I like to err on having too much on the c drive rather that too little space especially since you are installing AD on it and it will be a domaincontroller. You don't want to rebuild this if you don't have to later. If I have multiple hard drives and at least two of them are the same size I would at the least mirror my OS drive so if one fails you can break the set, replace the failed drive and remirror the set after replacing the failed drive. You need to plan for these contingencies when setting up a domain controller. If the tolal drive space is 6.9 gb I would make my primary partition a basic drive with the full space allocated to the OS and some applications. If I have multiple drives of the same size I would make d or e an application drive and I would put the user data on one, two or three of the other drives. (depends on how many you have.) I may even break up the data by functional levels of the organization for security reasons. If you can segrate management data from normal users then this data can be more secure by denying access to a specific drive for that group of users. These are just a few ideas for you.

1 - OS and some apps save a lot of room for hotfixes, app updates, pagefile (at least 1.5 times memory - don't get carried away and make this too big on the pagefile size. ) and set up a parallel installation
2 - Mirror Drive 1
3 - Apps
4 - Management Data
5 - User Data
6 - save as a spare drive for drive failures

Please note that if you don't or will not have a lot of user data then you may only want to allocate user data to one drive.

Maybe this answer is a little clearer.Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Do you have a backup ? If so you need to set up a backup routine and offsite storage (in case of fire or other natural castrophe)for your backups with a tape rotation system. Save an end of the year tape to archive for IRS audits etc.
Make sure to back up data on April 15th if tax returns are complete by that day. Some companies extend their returns.

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