I have read quite a few posts on this forum from people with similar problems, but no solutions seem to help me...

So I got this laptop from someone who was throwing it out. All it needed was a new HD, so I threw in a 40GB drive and it works great. My only problem is booting from the hard drive.. I have succesfully booted from a 2GB FAT16 partition into Dos 6.22. However, I tried installing Windows 2000 and it will format the whole drive (40GB) with NTFS and copy files. However, after it restarts the computer, I get this message:

A disk read error has occurred
Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart

Now the weird thing is if I create the 40GB NTFS partition and start off of a boot disk, I can access the drive no problem. Read, write, the full 40GB. The only problem seems to be booting off of it.

So I booted off a Win 98 boot disk and deleted the partition and created a new FAT32 drive and installed Windows 98SE on it. This boots fine as well, however the maximum size it will let me make is 8GB. I know FAT32 should be able to handle a 40GB partition, but fdisk says that the 8GB partition is filling up 100% of the drive.

So basically I want to install Windows 2000 on this laptop, but I want to make use of the full size of the drive, not just 8GB. I don't care if it is FAT32 or NTFS, just as long as it boots.

The laptop is updated to the latest BIOS (1.08) which specifically says it supports Windows 2000. Presumably this means it should be able to boot off of an NTFS partition, as this is the default for Win2k.

Suggestions?

Basically the Laptop BIOS does not handle 40GB hard drives, probably the Max is 8GB or thereabouts, hence the boot problems...........

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s...

If the BIOS did not support hard drives larger than 8GB, wouldn't I not be able to access the 40GB NTFS partition I created when booting off a disk?

Alternatively, if it will only BOOT off of an 8GB partition, shouldn't I be able to creat the 8GB partition to boot from and then create a new partition using the rest of the space that windows can access?

I don't know what to tell you but I had a 380XD that I upgraded to a 20GB drive, and it worked fine. Also, I have one laptop drive lying around here out of some other old laptop, that works fine in my desktop with an adapter, but none of my Thinkpads like it

You might try partitioning the drive into two 20GB drives, use one for storage. I don't like one big partition, anyway, because if you have to reinstall Whenhozed, you can save your saved files.

Though you may be able to access, there will be no gaurantee you will not in the long term have data corruption. The easiest way is to us Drive Overlay Software which hides the full size of drive from the BIOS.