I have just installed NT4 Workstation on a brand new 10 GB Harddrive. I managed to get through NT telling me that my harddrive was unformatted or damaged by deleting and then re-creating a a 1.5 GB partition for the installation. Now NT won't let me format an extended partition. First it informs me that my partition is of unknown capacity. When I try to push on through that, it informs me that "Windows NT was unable to complete the format". Since this is a brand new harddrive, I don't see how it could have an incompatible Fat format getting in the way, but who knows... I've tried using an Fdisk from a Win98 boot disk to no avail (wrong DOS version). I've read several of the posted suggestions at this site, but they have all refered to a previously installed OS causing the problem. Is there anyway to solve this problem without reinstalling? If I reinstall, what do I need to do to avoid this problem again? Thanks for your help.

You must replace atapi.exe by a new version of atapi.exe, you can find it in the lattest service pack of NT4 (drag the zipped file SP6a of NT4 on an icon of winzip.exe on the desk to obtain the new atapi.exe and (before) rename the old atapi.exe in atapi.old ). With the old atapi.exe (19Ko) you can't format all the HDD over 8,5Go. With the new one, you can format every big HDD. The atapi.exe is situated in the 3rd diskette of NT4 installation (with fdisk.exe)

You can also use zeleps (http://zeleps.com/) to resolve your problem. zelep is a freeware which permit to format every HDD (until 2 To, yes Tera), without wiping datas. It's a MUST!