I bought an HP Pavilion ze5170 laptop pre-loaded with XP home edition. I want a dual boot NT4 and XP environment. To get this I used a windows 98 startup diskette and fdisk stating ‘No’ to the enable large disk support question, then deleting the 2MB Non-DOS partition and the 38GB NTFS volume. I then exited fdisk and used format c: /s. At this stage I thought I would be able to power off the laptop and start loading NT4 which in turn would allow me to add another partition (I note that to re-use my XP software it must have the C: drive and that I need each operating system loaded to its own volume) and complete the installations. The first NT4 diskette loads fine, the second fails when it gets to loading the FAT file system at which point I get a crash screen stating INNACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. I can provide the hex dump that comes with it but I suspect it is not helpful to whoever is kind enough to assist me resolve the issue. I have tried several different ‘flavours’ in fdisk but get the same result. Can someone please help me with step by step assistance since I am not familiar with this process and so no knowledge should be assumed.

I would remove all partitions. Make 1 primary FAT16 partition of the size you choose (I made one of 2gb the biggest a fat16 partition can become, and also use this as a swap drive for my different OSes that recognize fat16) and then you can make your other desired partitions. Windows XP & NT4 both use this primary fat16 partition as a bootdrive.

Jelle, thanks for your reply. I believe I have done as you suggested. I removed all partitions and then went through the process of creating a primary active DOS partition 2GB FAT16 and an extended DOS partition FAT16 2GB drive. Then I used the 3 NT4 setup disks but it consistently fails when it loads the FAT file system on the second disk. If you have further suggestions I would welcome them.

Why can't you boot right to the NT CD?