Aspired by Citrix Conference, decided to go VIRTUAL. Look at my desk, the only physical thing (you have more, mate, keyboard, mouse…) I have is the desktop PC. So……XenServer is the solution.

…Install XenServer 4.1 on a HP7800 (E6550)
…Push XP CD in the CD Rom to make a Template VM
…Copy the XP image and customize my own
…Decommission my desktop PC (!!!)

Wait, you have got a 250GB hard disk there, with NTFS format, what about that?

…Put on the XenServer PC, can see /dev/sdb
…Mount as a NTFS disk, READONLY

Googling…Tired…The only thing I can do is to format it as Linux format (ext3) and use it as a Storage Repository.

…BACKUP the 250GB somewhere
…dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 (change to your own device)
…fdisk /dev/sdb (to create the partition)
…pvcreate /dev/sdb
…xe sr-create content-type="Local SR” host-uuid=YOUR_XENServer_UUID
type=ext device-config-device=/dev/sdb1 shared=false name-label="Second HDD”

Done, now I can see from XenCenter the second Storage Repository.

…xe sr-list (let me have a look what has been created)

A lot of fun, isn’t it.

Reference:
How To Add Disk Storage to the XenServer Host http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx116176
How to Create a Local File-based Storage Repository http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116322

Please note, when you read the second KB from Citrix, you do not need to remove the current SR (which can be disastrous), just create one with the “xe sr-create” command will suffice. You can change the new SR as the default by either command line tool, or in XenCenter GUI.