NT 4 Installation

[vermin]

I am trying to install NT4 onto a worstation with AMD K6 350mhz, 64mb ram, 8GB hd etc. Boot from cd and when trying to format the C' drive after partition creation, blue screen crashes and comes up with the following message.
"***STOP: 0X0000000A (0X8AA42066, 0X00000002, 0X00000001,0X80112280)
IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL....ADDRESS 80112280 HAS BASE AT 80100000 - ntoskrnl.exe"
Under that the other normal stuff about dll base, date stamp and name.
Its all mumbo jumbo to me but the machine was working perfectly until last week when it blue screened. I have tried swapping hardware around to no effect.Anyone suggest the cause or direct me to where i could find out. !

 

[johncurtis]

This can have quite a few causes. Check out

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q165/8/63.asp

for some details.
John

 

[MikeEasdon]

Check your IRQ settings in your BIOS (if possible), sounds like a possible conflict

 

[vermin]

John, have checked the above as you suggested and I can now get to the first reboot after formatting and installing the files, upon reboot i get "a disk read error occurred, insert a system diskette and restart the system"
During the reboot i amended the bios to boot from the c' drive so it doesnt start the NT instal again..Any ideas...anyone ??

 

[johncurtis]

Have you formatted as FAT or NTFS, and have you set up partitions? There is a size limit of 2GB for FAT and 7.8GB for NTFS for system partitions.
I'd try using a 2GB FAT partition first - you can always convert it to NTFS later.
Good luck
John

 

[jaeddy]

Just a long-shot here, but I ran in to a similar problem many, many moons ago. I had to do a low-level format of the drive, essentially wiping it of EVERYTHING and returning it to "factory new" condition. In my case we had used partition magic to manipulate partitions several times on the disk (it was a lab development machine) and it seemed that some kind of junk got left behind even with an fdisk and format.

It happened that we had the disk manufacturer's utility disk that provided a tool to do the low-level format. If you know the manufacturer you ought to be able to download something similar, or be able to find a decent share/freeware utility to do it.

 

[vermin]

cheers, jaeddy, I'll have a look for a low level format program and see if that does the job..I reckon in doing that first and then go with John's idea of FAT 1st..any suggestions for good freeware sites ??

 

[AlexIT]

I have had similar problems here. I too did a low-level format (from the Adaptec SCSI controller tools) of the SCSI drive. After this, the re-install went quickly and the workstation has been running very good. Sometime I think FDISK isnt a good enough tool for manipulating drives.

Alex

 

[jaeddy]

Actually, you might want to check your BIOS in the IDE section and see if the BIOS will do it for you. This is often an option. A quick search on Google didn't turn up anything of a free nature, but if you eyeball the drive you should be able to find the manufacturer's name (Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc), then go to their site and download their utility. If it is a scsi drive then the scsi controller almost certainly included a utility to do this (as Alex suggested).

Depending on the tool they may refer to it as a low level format or as Initializing the drive.