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Reinstalling NT - Need Help gettting sta

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by kimscomputing

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Our Hard drive of 5 years died today. I attempted to load my 1997 version of NT 4.0 from the files on to a new 40 gig hard drive. I haven't loaded NT before. I tried many different settings in fdisk and format options but couldn't come up with theright format. It would progress through restarting the computer and then wouldn't bring up the setup screen. Its an AMD 750/256K/40 gig Maxtor Hard Drive. Please Help.

10 replies

by dmiles

Donot enable large disk support,when you format the drive using FDISK,it automattically setup FAT32,which NT does not recognize.
Wipe the drive clean and donot enable large disk support,use the NT setup disk to run setup using a FAT partition and then use another computer if possible to download ATAPI.EXE file from Microsoft website,it will update system to read the large hard drive which may only read 4 gig

by rjager

note this though....

- NT 4.0 BOOT partition should not be >8GB.
For finding the correct boot-files.
I recommend in this case repartition your HDD with a small boot partition and a LARGE system partition.

- Try to get a SP4 atapi.sys ( from MicroSoft) as this regognises >8GB HDD.

by graham marwood

Get the machine working in dos with a 2 Gb partition. Boot to the CD by either adding the cd into the startup via BIOS or ad CD rom drivers to DOS. Follow your nose through the installation of NT 4. Install the latest service pack, add the second partition. You'll have to make do with whatever the partition size the systems see's from within NT

by dumoulip

Check for BIOS updates (or at least HD controller updates). Sometimes these allow the hardware to support larger disk sizes but you're right that NT4 PRE SP3 won't support anything over 8Gb. If you are not using raid, create a small 2gb partition, format to NTFS and install NT4. Once done, the first thing to do is upgrade to SP6a. Once you do that use a utility such as partition magic to expand your partition to support the rest of the drive.

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