Bought a new computer almost exactly a month ago. I'm a student, so it's cheap (I know, my first mistake). Compaq Presario 5000, 700MHz Celeron, 128MB, 15GB hard drive, Intel 810 chipset. Came with WindowsMe pre-installed. Really need to be running NT Workstation or Server, preferably Server. Thought I'd wipe the thing and dual-boot '98 and NT. '98 installed fine, but NT gave me an error message. When prompted for the drive to install NT, it then tells me that (regardless of drive) it's unformatted or damaged. It asks if I want to format, I say yes, it says "can't" and exits the installation. I've tried several configurations of partitions, Fat16, NTFS, wiping the whole thing and installing just NT. Same error message. Could it be a hardware incompatibility problem? Any ideas?

Couple of things to try. First, the system partition can't be greater than 2000 Mb (2Gig). Second, if you are into wiping the copmuter there is an undocumented feature of FDISK - fdisk /mbr which formats the master boot record. You'll want to create a boot disk with fdisk on it. Good luck!

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q195/2/11.ASP 'may' have an answer for you... Post #3279 on this NT forum offers a viable way to set up your dual-boot. It's not the 'only' way, but it does work; and the info is pretty complete and clearly put - credit to the chap who posted it orginally... Critical item is the FAT16 C: system (active Primary) partition; which is where both OS's will install their respective boot/start-up files, with their respective(system) OS files going into separate logical-drives in the Extended partition. Might be useful to post back with an update if/when you get it all going OK?

*taking lots of notes, printing KB article, rubbing hands together with glee and skipping off to break my 'puter...again* Wow...thanks, guys! I'll let you know how it goes when I get it back up.

For i810 and other NT drivers I find Dells support page nicer than Compaqs. Dual booting is a pain in the ass, especially when changing/reloading OSs often. If you have a free full height bay get a swap rack with two trays and use another drive for NT work.Being able to treat hard drives like any other removable media is quite handy.

I have been going through the same process. I did the following to dual boot with 98/NT and Me/NT. (assuming that we are starting with a totally clean hard drive with no partitions) 1. Run fdisk and say No to enabling large drive support 2. Create a primary partition and exit 3. I installed 98 or Me on C: drive at this stage 3. Run fdisk again and say yes to large drive support (fat32) 4. Create extended partition using all space available 5. Create logical drive D: using all space available 6. Restart computer 7. Run fdisk again and delete the logical drive D: leaving extended partition intact. 8. Restart computer 9. Install NT, NT install process will let you create drive D: and install NT there. 10. After NT is installed and you have installed a service pack of 4.0 or higher you will be able to use Disk Administrator and partition the remaining disk space. I just did this today without any problems C.O.