Installing NT 4.0 Server on an IDE Drive

[superco7]

I am trying to install NT 4.0 Server on an IDE drive but setup says that it does not detect a hard drive. Does anyone have any suggestions.

Thanks.

 

[wolluf]

More details please. Is the drive detected in the bios? Is it a new (blank) drive? How old is machine - has it been running another o/s? Anything unusual (eg, I'd expect drive to be primary master - master on 1st IDE connector. If its not - or you've a controller card etc). If you boot from 98 boot floppy, can fdisk see the drive (this after checking bios sees it of course).

(what service pack level is the NT install CD)?

 

[superco7]

The drive is detected in bios, and it is blank, it once had Windows 2000 on it. It is also the master on the 1st IDE connector, and there is no controller card. I have booted using the 98 boot disk and have used fdisk to create a partition, thinking that this may solve the problem. Not sure what the service pack is on the installation cd, where do you find that? I am stummped.

 

[rdroske]

Depends on what format you created the partion with and how large. No fat32 (ie do not select support for large hard drioves) and then dont install NT to anything bigger that 4 Gig. It will recognize and install to larger but then crash.

 

[wolluf]

I know from other posts that there are one or two motherboards which use non-standard IDE controllers - so NT would need to have drivers supplied (like you would for a SCSI drive). Long shot - but could be the problem.

 

[superco7]

Thanks. I will try both.

 

[itsp1965]

If this drive is larger than 8GB, NT4 will have hard time installing on it. You will need the ATAPI.SYS driver from NT SP4 when installing the OS. When running install, press F6 to select the disk and when prompted insert a disk with this driver.

 

[rdroske]

If you boot from a dos disk and fdisk can see it you can use it. Just don't enable large drive support when fdisk starts and create a 4 Gig or smaller fat16 partition.

You can then convert that to NTFS during NT install if you want. Then the rest of the disk should be seen as available
in Disk Manager when NT starts up.

 

[wolluf]

rdoske - you can't create a 4GB fat16 partition with fdisk - and the problem is NT is not detecting a drive at all.

I don't think enhanced atapi.sys driver will help (but worth trying -

http://www.htl-steyr.ac.at/~morg/drivers/NT_Atapi/

will help for this) - as that just allows NT to see whole drive if > 8GB. Otherwise it just sees it as an 8GB drive. Assuming all hardware is ok, this points to NT needing a driver for the IDE controller.

 

[rdroske]

Fdisk has nothing to do with NT and I said no larger than.
If you can fdisk it NT will see it.

 

[wolluf]

rdroske - you said 'If you boot from a dos disk and fdisk can see it you can use it. Just don't enable large drive support when fdisk starts and create a 4 Gig or smaller fat16 partition' - I say again fdisk can't create 4GB fat16 partition (only NT install can - and its not useable by anything else - really just a device to allow 4GB NTFS boot partition).

fdisk is part of dos (whether win9x/ME or earlier). It will only be able to work if dos has drivers for the drive controller and the drive. NT is a completely different o/s (ableit M$ as well) - so if fdisk can see it, that's no guarantee NT can too.

 

[rdroske]

I never said fdisk could create a 4 gig partition. Just said NT couldn't use one bigger.

I put NT on 2 gig partitions anyways so it works for me.

Also with a 98 boot disk and fdisk I have fdisked and formatted partitions on servers with RAID controllers from DOS (let alone a single IDE drive).

I have a server I've been meaning to rebuild so I will do it now. Its an older dell with a perc 2 RAID controller with 5 8 gig disks.

I will recreate the container as one RAID 5 40+ gig with a scrub. Then boot from a 98 boot disk, create and format the a 2 Gig partition and run WINNT from the CD. I guarantee it will see and copy files to the disk.

I have seen some cases where even after NT initially copies the files it will blue screen with inaccessible boot device after the restart.

In those cases I have just had to go through the "create boot disk" install method.