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Installation Guide for the Intel Server Control 9
Service Partition and Population
The service partition is a special hard disk partition. It is established when initially setting up the
server system and contains utilities, diagnostics, and other software required for remote
management. The service partition is not marked as an active partition and the server will only
boot from it by a special request. It is not normally visible to the server user because it has a
special non-standard partition type that does not appear as an accessible file system to the end user
operating system. However, low level disk utilities can see the partition entry as an unknown type,
and recognize its space.
The utilities and diagnostics on the service partition can be run locally or remotely. In order to run
the utilities and diagnostics the server must boot from the service partition. Remote execution is
available from the Direct Platform Control (DPC) Console Manager and System Setup Utility
(SSU) Client.
Service Partition Installation
It is recommended that you install the service partition:
• On a clean formatted hard drive with no partitions defined.
• Before installing any operating system.
It can also be installed on a hard drive that contains partitions, providing there is unpartitioned
space and one free entry in the partition table. However, these are not recommended because some
operating systems may no longer boot if partitions are added or removed after that OS has been
installed.
Requirements
• The SP can be on any of the first 8 BIOS-supported physical hard drives.
• SP hard drives must support BIOS INT13.
• Current ECO BIOS must be installed.
• Remove old service parititions and create service partition with current Software Kit CD.
• At least 50 MB of unused (not partitioned) hard drive space. On large hard drives this unused
space must be within the first 8 GB.
• A service partition does not already exist on the hard drive.
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NOTE
There are commercial utilities that can resize existing partitions to free space
if more is needed. Alternately, you can add a low capacity hard drive for the
service partition.