Another interesting new NTFS feature is that you can now perform Unix-like mounts of disk volumes into subdirectories of other volumes. This can create a logical single volume and not need to keep using letters of the alphabet to refer to each volume on the server.

FAT32
For those of you who want to dual boot between Windows 9x and Windows 2000, there's finally support in Windows 2000 for FAT32 (Microsoft's 32-bit File Allocation Table format, which is far more efficient for data storage). During setup, if you create a FAT drive smaller than 2GB it'll be in FAT16 format. However, if it's larger than 2GB it'll be in FAT32 format. This shouldn't be a problem for production servers (where you should be using NTFS), but keep in mind that Windows 2000 can't create FAT32 volumes any larger than 32GB.

Basic disks versus dynamic disks
Windows 2000 introduces the concept of basic disks versus dynamic disks. The basic disk has primary and extended partitions, just like we used to know in Windows NT. A dynamic disk volume takes over the entire physical drive and can't be seen by anything other than Windows 2000. With dynamic disks, you can extend the size of a drive to use any free space available, and you can create RAID-0 (striped), RAID-1 (mirrored), and RAID-5 (disk striping with parity) arrays in software.

Miscellaneous changes
Terminal Server functionality has now been integrated within Windows 2000 Server. We typically think of Terminal Services as being used for application sharing from a central server. However, it also comes with a two-user remote administration mode license that, as an administrator, lets you get a window from the server when running the Terminal Services client. From here, you can issue commands to run on the server, edit the registry on the server, or use the server menu options. Unfortunately, one thing you can't do is to access the Domino server console here. Of course, you can already get this easily enough from Domino Administrator.

Similarly, there's also a Telnet Server service that can provide remote command-line access to the Windows 2000 server. The licensing is also limited to two clients at a time. If you use the new Microsoft Telnet Client to access the server, you can optionally use NTLM (NT LAN Manager) authentication.

Lastly, you've probably seen Safe Mode in Windows 95 and Windows 98. This has finally been added to Windows 2000. In case you've made a configuration change or installed a driver that keeps crashing your system, you can press F8 at the initial boot-up screen. You're then presented with an Advanced Options menu that includes the options Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking, and Safe Mode with Command Prompt.

Where is it now?
Unfortunately, nearly all the Windows 2000 tools we're most familiar with have been moved and/or renamed, so it's going to take some practice for us to locate them without having to think first.

Table A lists the main server tools of interest and where they can now be found: