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Fdisk Blues

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by vi-tech

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I formated a drive, installed win98 and during the process of installing win98 the program stopped. I tried several things it didnt work. I did fdisk after everyting else failed, viewed current disk setting, it said I had non-dos partion. I deleted it, created a primary, then restarted, then I view the partion information and it defaulted to non-dos. *Note I deleted the non-dos previously and created a Primary dos. This is blowing my mind.. I need to know why is this happening??

5 replies

by thechas

Try running fdisk /mbr first.

Then delete your partition and start over.

It is possible that the drive has a drive / BIOS overlay program installed.
The MBR switch should get rid of that and allow you to proceed normally.

Another possibility is that you have a drive over 32GB and one of the motherboards that has problems with large hard drives and Windows 98.

Try creating a primary partition of less than 32 GB (32760 in the fdisk size box should work)
Then use the rest of the drive as an extended partition and place 1 or more logical drives there.
See the partition strategy guide at www.aumha.org

If you have a really big drive, try the new version of fdisk.
I believe there is a link at www.bootdisk.com

There are links to fdisk tutorials at www.fdisk.com/fdisk

Chas

by Member 32001153

First: fdisk /mbr only rewrites the master boot record.

Second: Which version of 98?

Third: Which version of FDISK are you using? Are you using DOS? If the partition created is FAT-32, then DOS will see the partition as NON-DOS, which is correct. A DOS partition is FAT-16. If you're using the Windows 98 CD to create your partition, it might be creating a FAT-32 partition. An NTFS partition, which is available with NT and above is also a NON-DOS partition. OEM partitions i.e. Compaq system partitions are also NON-DOS.

Fourth: If you want to install Windows 98, just remove all partitions and boot with the 98 CD in the drive. This assumes your BIOS supports booting from a CD and it is set to boot from CD before accessing the HDD.

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