Hi
Every time I run the NT setup it says
"setup is unable to locate the hard drive partition prepared be the MS-DOS portion of setup. When you run the MS-DOS Windows NT setup program, you must specify a temporary drive that is supported by Windows NT,” it says this at the very. Please Help!

It says this at the very end (missed end out on the last line)

How are you going about installing NT; size of drive (overall); is the drive configured/partitioned (or not)?

Hi
I re-partitioned and formatted the hard drive to fat 16 and it worked. Thanks

Good for you; NT can create and install to fat16 - max partition size = 4Gig. It would have been nice to know how you went about initially - if only for academic reasons/interest?

Hi
I restarted my computer with a windows 98 boot up floppy disk (from www.bootdisk.com) and deleted all 4 of my partitions off my hard drive using the command fdisk and created one big one to start off with. I then formatted it to fat 32 and started the windows NT setup, then about 1 hour later it said that setup was unable to locate the hard drive partition prepared by the MS-DOS portion of setup. I then repartitioned the hard drive into 2 partitions, fat 32 (C:) and fat 16 (D:), tried running setup again but I had the same error, and setup was unable to locate the hard drive partition prepared by the MS-DOS portion of setup. I then rebooted the computer and run fdisk again, but this time I didn't enable large disk support, after deleting all of the partitions I created two new partitions without using the large disk support and formatted them. I then ran fdisk again and found out that they where both fat 16, this time when I ran setup it worked, I now have two 1.99GB hard drives that are both fat 16. Also I found out that fdisk tells you at the beginning that enabling large disk support would not work with some versions of Windows 95 and NT. I used to have windows 3.11 and dos 6.22 on the computer.

OK...

Some general items to be aware of...

NT will not install in fat32 partition, only in fat16 (4Gig max) and ntfs4; it will (access) work with ntfs5 (W2K/XP version of ntfs) - provided you install sp4 or later before exposing the OS to ntfs5.

The max partition size NT can create during setup is 4Gig; and this can be fat16 or ntfs. It creates the ntfs as fat16 first and converts it subsequently to ntfs4.

If you want to use a disk over 7.8/8Gig with NT then you need the updated atapi.sys driver installed (it's in sp4 and later), and also need a bios that supports it (or larger drives).

It is not wise to make the system partition (where the NT boot/startup files reside) over 7.8/8Gig; if you do then there's every chance the OS will not boot - if you manage to install it all... This because the essential boot/start-up files could pass beyond that

You can have an ntfs partition over 4Gig and well in excess of that (greater than 8Gig) as ntfs; but it has to be created in advance via one of two/three a of methods...

Fdisk will work with any drive - large disk support allows a drive to be formatted as fat32; and once you invoke large dive support the file format will be fat32 by default, not fat16. Not using large disk support limits you to fat16 (2Gig limits).

You seem to have 4Gig drive, using 2 fat16 partitions, one for the OS/apps etc. and the other for data is good way to go. A larger area for NT itself might be useful if you really loaded it up, bit's not essential. It sounds to me as though you're getting acros NT for the first time? If so and you'd like "a few" useful links/resources/sites post back? I can point you to a few...

Running fat16 on the (fat16 - 2Gig max) Primary allows you to have dos installed (and also win3x) and alongside NT...

The atapi.sys driver does NOT correct the bios/ntfs bug in NT that says you should not exceed system/boot partition of 7.8gig.

Quick lesson: in ms-speak boot is where the winnt folder resides and system is where boot.ini, ntldr etc reside. If both on the same partition its referred to as system/boot. If seperate c: is system and d: is boot under default install.

You NEVER want to exceed this barrier or you can end up with a nonbooting system. This is due to the loader files being beyond the bios ability to address them.

Here is a way you can get around this limitation
http://www.ntfaq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=13922
and have as large a boot partition as you have disk space.

There is a bit of confusion about NT and fat16. Normally fat16 is limited to 2gig as you discovered George. NT, out of the box, can install to 4gig max for system/boot. It is able to do this due to the VFAT driver.

To take advantage of this you would use fdisk to make a 4gig partition. You would answer YES to large disk support.
Since it is FORMAT that decides the file system [fat16 or fat32] you would NOT use format to format this partition.

You would use the NT install to format the partition which it will do with no complaints.

George, not to be rude, but if you had spent 5 minutes googling NT Install you could have saved yourself hours [if not days] of wasted lifespan.

A search would have explained why your NT installs failed on fat32. It would have revealed a couple of methods of overcoming the NT limitation dealing with install.

BTW the method above I pointed you to is excellent for setting up multiboots BUT you can NOT multiboot DOS or DOS based OS's [9x/me] since they have a common msdos.sys/io.sys.

If you want to multiboot dos OS's you can do it with this
http://www.computing.net/howto/simple/usingpqboot/

Best of luck!

Hi

Thankyou for all of your help :-)
George