Install can't find hard drive

[arobart]

Ok, I think I did something really stupid here. I had NT Workstation running on a server we were using as a firewall and didn't need anymore so I figured I would just use as a PC. I won't tell you the whole stupid story, but the bottom line is I used fdisk on the hard drive and formatted it with a 98 startup disk and I need to load NT Workstation back on it and the install won't recognize the hard drive. It starts the install and says there aren't any hard drives installed and it quits the installation. Does anyone know how I can correct this???

Thanks
Annette

 

[jrbarnett]

Hi

The chances are that NT doesn't have a built in driver for the disk controller, so it can't find any hard drives.

Get hold of a driver floppy, boot from the NT CD and press F6 to specify a custom driver, put your floppy in and you should be okay.

John

 

[arobart]

Thanks, I'll give it a try!

 

[stevieblunder]

Ahh guys,
You do know that W98 does not support NTFS and NT-4 does not support FAT32 ? Only a FAT16 HDD format will work for iether, and that will be limited to, hmm, I think it was 2G.

One great feature of old NT-4 was that the basic I86 OS image depended on the BIOS for I/O, sooo, a basic NT-4 image will work on different PCs. It's an advantage of not being PnP. Video driver is one thing you generally have to install, or live with a low res display.

I would take the HDD, hang it on an unused IDE port of another NT box and use NT to format and partition it, make it "active", which I think means writing the boot sector.

If you have a box with two NT images, you can copy the non-boot image to the new drive. You will want to tweak the copy of boot.ini and be sure ntloader etc is in the root.

You should also know that NT-4 ntloader can not see past 8G, so winnt has to be in the lower 8G, unless you replace ntloader with the ntloader from NT-5. And, of course, before SP4, NT-4 did not handle drives >8G at all. I would consider using W2K, ie NT-5.0

Steve

 

[arobart]

You are right about the Win98 & NT4! But I got it sorted out. I actually found my IBM setup disk and was able to setup from that so all worked out ok!
Annette