I have installed NT on my laptop, which was a dual-boot between 98se and slackware linux, using lilo as the bootloader. I have installed NT4 on a 561Mb FAT Partition, (past the 2.1gb and 4gb marks, if that matters in any way) and if I try to boot NT using either NTLDR or lilo, it will only flash a blinking cursor. All HDD activity ceases, it just flashes the cursor indefinetly. I have now tried both FAT and NTFS partitions, lilo on the MBR and ntldr on the partition bootsector and vice versa. I can't boot from floppy as there is no floppy drive in my laptop.

You can only boot nt from c:. What file format is c:? It has to be fat16 [max 2gig]

"wanderer" FYI NT4 C: drives can be up to 4GB FAT16, and as he is using a Boot Loader this should be irrellevent if NT4 is to all intents and purposes made to belive it is on the first active partition. I am not even 10% sure, but maybe look at a different Boot Manager!

I had a similar problem when i had mandrake w/lilo..mandrake was on the first partition and nt was further on down..i just made a small (30 meg) fat partition in the first partition (the new "c" drive and reinstalled NT on "d" and it booted fine then.... You'll need a repartitioning tool that can non-destructively resize partitions ..

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;197295 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;217210

rogerashley 4gig fat is a NT system ONLY and is only accomplished by NT's vfat driver. This can only be achieved if done by install AND STILL HAS TO HAVE EITHER A FAT16 FIRST PRIMARY PARTITION TO BOOT FROM OR BE THE FIRST PRIMARY PARTITION OF 4GIG. Lilo is not like Boot Magic or System commander in that it CAN NOT HIDE OR FOOL THE OS concerning partitioning. Flashing cursor means the bios didn't find a mbr which you would expect if trying to mount a foreign to NT partition. You might want to consult a couple of documents "How to multiboot NT with greater then 4gig" which I wrote in 1999 http://www.windows2000faq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=13922 And how to use Partition Magic's pqboot to boot multiple OS's with each thinking they are on c: http://www.computing.net/howto/simple/usingpqboot/