[RESOLVED] nt40 wkstn wont recognize hd during install

[jhert]

when i try to install nt40 wkstn, i get to the mass storage device screen and nt only recognizes my ide cdrom. ide HDD will not recognize. hdd is 6gb maxtor i believe. any help would be great i am currently dead in the water.

[Tech Head]

Is the HDD IDE and is it running off the Motherboard IDE Controller or an adaptor card. ?

Martin

[scutterboy]

Does it see the drive at all??
If it does check the format of the drive make sure you dont have FAT32 partition as NT wont be able to use that space.

Win2000 also causes this by upgrading NTFS version from 4 to 5 and the Disk admin in NT4 install can't use the space.

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And Control Enter STILL wont let me post a reply.

[GHSTECH]

Tech Head has the right idea if you have the harddrive on a ultra 66 or 100 controller like a promise raid card or even some motherboards that have four channel ide controllers onboard. you will have to get the driver for them and load it when nt setup ask you to press F6 to load other drivers, just like you would with a scsi controller.

[Tech Head]

Thanks GHSTECH, that's what was going to get at.. Basically we need some more information about your system.

Martin

[TangleWeb]

A side note; If you have a non-compatible partitioning scheme, like FAT32, you can use AEfdisk to delete that partition, then install NT onto the unpartitioned space. The command is "aefdisk /delall". This is a powerfull utility! It doesn't say "are you sure", or anything. It just deletes ANY partition on the drive. You can download it fromhttp://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10096-100-2728098.html?tag=st.dl.100 01-103-1.lst-7-1.2728098

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Dave Sparks,
Support Analyst

[This message has been edited by TangleWeb (edited March 16, 2001).]

[jhert]

thanks for all of the info guys. here's a little more. the system is an AST advantage 9321. there is no adapter card for the ide, it is running from the mb. i checked ast's website for updated drivers and they had none.
when i boot the system it see's both hdd and cdrom. the hdd is a WD 6g. i load the three floppies and nt only sees the cdrom. when i continue from there, setup tells me it cannot proceed with install because i has nowhere to copy files.

i debugged the drive so that it would be clean, ran fdisk and created a fat 16 partition still nogo. i even tried installing on top of win 98, still nogo.

appreciate the help keep it comin : )

[rover]

It sounds like a hidden partion.
What you can try is Partition Magic. Make a bootdisk and try to boot from it.
Run Partition Magic. When you can see the HD then check if the partition is hidden or not. When it is hidden, unhide it. If it is not hidden, try to delete the partition and recreate a new partition. Format it to NTFS or FAT. Do not format it to FAT32. NT will see it, but wil not install on it.

Good luck

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"Four fried chickens and a coke" - Jake

[condor]

I would boot from a floppy
and use

aefdisk /delall /mbr (if you want to wipe the HDD clean)

reboot

Boot from the 3 Floppies or the CD-ROM

It should work fine.

if it still gives you problems try this:

after wiping clean the HDD (aefdisk..) boot with Dos 6.22 Floppy (you can get it here : http://64.124.205.178/IMGS/DOS622.EXE )

Create a Primary Active Partition FAT16 2GB with FDISK.

reboot and format this partition.

reboot with CD-ROM support and copy the entire i386 directory from your cd-rom to c:

then run from c:\i386 the command winnt /b

after installtion is complete you can use Disk Administrator to partition and format the rest of the hdd

and you can convert c: to ntfs with

convert c: /fs:ntfs

don't forget to update to service pack 6a

hope you find it helpful.


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