Hi Mike,

On Wed, 17 Nov 1999 10:49:08   mike edge wrote:
>I am attempting to install NT ver. 4.0 into a hard drive that has 13 gigs of
>space on it. I have formated it useing FAT16 and have re partitioned it with
>1.0 gig as an one of the drives. when I put in the third startup disk to NT
>it tells me that my hard drive has to many cylinders (over 1024). how do I
>fix this problem? or do I need a new hard drive to run this operating
>system?

Personally, I would recommend you redo the partition. The drive isn't the
problem.  I would only create the one partition and let NT create the
other (or others if you want more than one).

What I do to set up NT:
I use a DOS boot disk (ver 6.22 with the generic cd-rom driver), as NT
doesn't play well with Win 95/98 utilities or formats.

- FDISK the drive.
FDISK, create partition, create primary partition, go for 2047 (the max
amount DOS supports...2 GIG) and make sure it is set as active.

- Reboot to the disk again

- Format the drive (FORMAT C: /U), but don't make it bootable.  NT
will do this for itself.  /U is for unconditional, so it won't try saving the
current drive information.  You could use the /S option as well (makes
the drive bootable), but if you don't plan on loading anything else
or go into a DOS boot, I would pass on it.

- If you have the 3 disks that come with NT, then reboot the machine
to those disks after the format is done.  It will walk you through
installing and configuring NT.  Goes fairly quick.

- After NT has completed and has booted for you, Select Start,
Programs, Administrative Tools (Common), Disk Administrator.

- It will want to write something to the drive (I believe track
0), so answer okay.

- You should see a small box appear showing drive C, and unpartitioned
area of about 11 gig or so, and the CD-ROM drive, probably letter D.

- Right-click on the CD-ROM drive and choose change letter and pick
letter E.  It may say it needs to commit the changes now, answer okay.
Then right click on the unpartitioned space and select Create....
It will then create the partition for you.  You should then be able to
select the drive and format it as an NTFS (it won't format as FAT16).
If not, select File, Commit Changes now.  It should then let you format
the drive.

You should also be able to boot to the NT disks and format the
entire drive as one drive using NTFS, which is NT's format.

You can make the disks from the NT Cd, if you do not have them,
using the command WINNT /ox, or install NT from the CD directly
by using WINNT /b (known as a diskless install).  This takes longer
because it is copying the image files for the 3 disks to the drive
and then running them.

Best of luck,
Lance Kephart


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