I'm trying to install Netware 6 onto a box with a 200GB IDE drive. The BIOS recognises the hard size correctly, but when I create the boot partition in the Netware installation the hard disk size is reported as about 73GB. This causes the install to bomb out when it tries to create the SYS partition, terminating the install process. I'm wondering if anyone knows of a limitation to NW6, if I need to use a newer spacked install or how to succeed. I've also tried to install this drive into a running NW6 server and create a volume on it, without success. My assumption is now that the drive is too large.

There's a big difference between the NetWare partition, the DOS partition, and the size of the SYS volume which are three distinct things. Your DOS partition, the boot partition, should be the size of your physical RAM. The NetWare partition will be the remaining space on the drive. The SYS volume is created on the NetWare partition and will not be the same size as the entire NetWare partition, assuming you are creating separate volumes on the NetWare partition other than SYS. There reallly isn't a need to create a huge SYS volume. 20 GB should be sufficient for an average file server. The remaining space is for data. You might consider consulting the Knowledgebase on Novell's website to see if there are any TIDs that relate to the IDE drive issue. Mark Pilkanis

I managed to fix this. I dounloaded the NW6 SP5 patch, extracted the ide files idecd.chm idecd.ddi idehd.chm idehd.ddi ideata.ham ideata.ddi i then installed these in the c:\nwserver folder (after backup of the originals) and added the idehd to the startup file. I was then able to view the whole 200gb, to initialize, partition whatever... problem solved.