need help!!!

1. Put the disk onto another NT Machine, and try to format it, to see if it is the disk or the Computer.

2. If the Computer is at fault, I would try installing/reinstalling the latest NT Service Pack.

Hope this helps.

Rob

You moved the disk from machine to machine...

The problem probably lay in the settings in CMOS on machine No.2, and not with the drive or formatting itself.

If you were adding the drive to a machine that didnt have a drive in it. You use a diskette with the DOS Operating System on it and the fdisk.exe utility.

When the machine boots. Change to the A: drive and type fdisk. Create a primary partition, and secondary partition (if necessary). Once done, do the NT install.
No problem.

from here, ... check the hardware settings for the drive (on machine No.2), the slave/master jumper settings. Once done, run 'auto detect HDD' in CMOS.

Hi;
The problem simply is :NT can not handel H.D IDE more than 13GB.
Only SP4 and later solve this problem.
Now if NT has to be installed on this disk as a boot disk ,You'll not have a chance to apply SP4 or latest.
Note that Microsoft recently selles NT4 CD's with SP4 BUILT IN (this CD will solve the problem).
If not (althuogh I did not try the following) try to format the disk on an NT server who has the latest SP.
I'm sorry for not having the exact fix.
Have a nice day
Ramy

My first guess is that this is not a new machine, probably a couple of years old. Back then, most BIOSes did not support Large disks, specially over 8 GB.
If that is the case, check the MB mfr for Bios updates.

To fix your HD, get a Startup disk for Win98, From Add/remove prog, on Control Panel, boot from the diskette with the HD in place. On the command prompt, type
fdisk /mbr
then
fdisk
accept all the defaults and delete all the partitions.
Reboot now with your NT CD in the CD-Rom with your Bios set to boot from CD, and your should be home free. Once on NT installation, make sure your allow 70 percent of the disk for C: depending on how much stuff you intent to install besides the OS (it's easier to defrag a drive that has atleast 40 % free space).

Let me know and good luck!

I would say that you have to delete the partition (14 GB) and make only one formated 4 GB FAT partition on it, you can do that from an other NT maschine, then put the disk back in the maschine you plan to install Win NT on. When you?re finished installing you can, in diskadministrator create 1 or more partitions in the remaning space.
And from a commandline you can write convert c: /fs:ntfs if you want the drive to be ntfs.

This should work just fine.
Mads

I would do a debuging on the hard drive first. In order to do debug, you have to call to the menufacture of your hard drive and ask them for debug information. Then I would use Win9x startup disk and get a FAT16 partition(maximun is 2GB). All Win9x/DOS startup disk can access FAT16 with out any problem(for future reference). You shouldn't have problem with installing NT on "C" partition.

I am wondering what type of hard drive you have? I mean Ultra ATA 66? or 100?
Do you use a controler card for hard drive?

Always, specific information posted, then get specific/right answer.

Good Luck.

"... No, i did not move the disk from machine to machine, what i did was i plugged the new hard disk to a live system, boot it up, allowing the system to detect the new drive, make use of disk administrator to format the new drive, shut down the server, unplugged the DEFAULT hard disk and leave the new drive in the system..."

And you then moved the drive (I should say "a drive,..any drive") to another machine. This issue appers to point to the hardware configuration and not to a software problem.

My solution for you would to be to take the machine to your local computer repair man.

Your issue is that the machine that you formated the drive with is using a diffrent NTFS.sys (Sp4 -Sp6) then what a new install would use. I have had the same issue. i had three drive install on a NT server with SP4 installed. i formated the to File server Drives after I installed SP4. later my Primary drive failed and i had to replace that drive. After installing NT server I could not see the other 2 drives until I install SP4. My recomindation is Create Nt boot floppyies delete the curent partition and recreated and as larg as you can install NT Server. and all the service packs then use a third party soft ware such as Partition magic to increase the size of the drive..

There are some critical points that you need to consider;

1. Even though NT will support NTFS to 2 terabytes, the boot partition is limited to 7.8 GB. I have fudged this limit, but I would not recommend trying to double it.
2. You make no mention of setting an "Active Partition" flag on the new disk. If the BIOS of your computer does not find an "Active" partition, it will act as if there are NO disks present.
3. If you decide to fall back on a fresh NT installation, the largest boot partition you will be able to create will be 4GB. This is because NT install creates the boot partition in FAT16 and converts to NTFS on the first blue startup screen.

Recommendation:
1. Use Norton Ghost to image your original drive to the new 14GB drive (if saving your existing system is desired, else run a normal NT install)
2. Use Partition Magic (or equivalent utility) to size the boot partition to 7.8GB.
3. Create 2nd NTFS partition from free space on remainder of drive (use partition magic or disk administrator, your preference).
4. Do not force NT outside the areas of it's design limitation as the results will be unpredictable.

Ray

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