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New to NT 4.0

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fenix

Technical User
Joined
Mar 29, 2001
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Location
US
Hi, I'm trying to install 4.0 on a 2GB hard drivein a compaq deskpro 2000. When I tried to do it with no partitions, as you all probably know, it got to the point after the 3 floppies were loaded and said that"setup is unable to locate a hard drive partition preparedby the msdos portion of setup...............you must specifya temp drive that is supported by winnt. ..

Ok, so I booted to a 98 start disk, did not enable large drive support, partitioned a primary active partition to 98%, and tried again with the 3 floppies. I got past these and proceeded to load everything that was going to load from the cd rom. It came to a point where it said to remove any floppies, remove any cdrom disks, and hit enter to restart the computer. I assume that setup was going to be finished by what was loaded on the hard drive, and this is where it would ask me for the product key. But........

When I restarted, all I got was an uppper left blinking cursor like there would be when there is nothing to boot from.

Any suggestions as to what is going on, (I did everything as prompted),or if I can use anything in the winnt folder that is still on my hard drive that I can access if I boot to a 98 disk. I did notice that there doesn't seem to be an I386 folder.

If anyone does reply, please be specific about the procedures or steps for a remedy as I am somewhat of a newbie. thx.

More info, I have had 95 and 98 installed so the functions of the computer seem to be working.
 
Is this a SCSI disk or IDE?

Can you flash the BIOS so you can boot from CD (its a lot quicker!). Find an early 95 boot floppy and choose large disk support. Fdisk it and format is to create a FAT16 partition rather than 98's FAT32 partition.

Install. If you get the same error, boot to the 95/98 floppy and check out C:\ detail contents of boot.ini
 
HI!

You can try this:

Format the drive as FAT 16 (already done..)

Boot with a Win98 startup disk - Choose the CDROM SUPPORT option,
and check that the CDROM is identified.
If not - you'll have to try other option like installing DOS drivers.

Use
SYS A: C:
to later boot from the hard-drive.

Copy HIMEM.SYS and SMARTDRV.EXE of same 98 ver as the floppy to the hard-drive.
(You'll find HIMEM.SYS on the floppy, and copy SMARTDRV.EXE from an existing 98 computer or from 98 setup CD).

Create this CONFIG.SYS file on the hard-disk:
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH

Place the NT setup CDROM in drive and copy the I386 folder to the hard-disk using the following commands:
C:
CD SMARTDRV (you've copied it before, didn't you?)
MD I386
CD I386
COPY D:\I386 (or E:\I386 or whatever the CD drive letter is)

Reboot the computer from hard-disk. Check that HIMEM.SYS loads from CONFIG.SYS

Type these commands:

SMARTDRV
CD I386
WINNT /b


Good luck






Yizhar Hurwitz
 
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