Help!! Win Nt Woe's!!

Morpheus

Hi,

I have a PC with winNT installed, its a p3 with 128 mb ram, im trying to install win98 on it, ive checked the C drive with disk admin and it says it is a FAT system, ive heard that you usually only find NT on NTFS drives, is it possible that A. NT is actually installed as indicated on a FAT system, or B. that disk admin is wrong??? i cant find any partitions on the drive, i want to install win 98 on the drive, how would i go about remopving WIN nt and putting on WIN 98, i need this info ASAP, im working on it today.

Also, heh, shameless plug.... im a VB + SQL server developer with almost 3 yrs exp, i just had a terrible weekend, ended a job, it was a 6 mth contract ive nothing lined up, im looking for perm work if you know of anything, please let me know???

cheers on the NT info, its v important.

jim_bob

if your looking to have a dual boot with win98 and win NT afaik you ahve to install win98 first ie format the whole disk and start again other wise the boot record is ****ed up

but if you just want to install 98 on it's own use boot up with a win98 start disk, fdisk to smash the nt partition and then create a new fat partition then you should be able to install win98 no problem

Sleipnir

it's been a while since I played with NT and I can't remember if you can install it on FAT. Although I'm pretty sure you can.

Best thing is to start up with a 98 boot disk
bootdisks
and then run fdisk from the a: prompt.
See what it says in partition information about what file system is in use.

If it's FAT, then you just need to re-format the disk and install windows 98 (btw, before you do this, make sure you can see your CD_ROM after booting from the a drive, otherwise you can't install anything!)
If it's NTFS, you'll need to delete the partition from fdisk and then recreate it as FAT.
You won't be able to do this from disk manager as the you can't reformat or delete a partition that the OS currently in use is on!

Frank Grimes

NT can be installed on FAT16.
If you don't want to keep the install of NT or the data, just format the drive after booting from a bootdisk and install 98.

spongebob

if you want to dual boot off that FAT partition you must install W98 onto FAT16 first and then install NT (max size of the partition 4096 Mb)

M

Morpheus

would i be able to see the partition in disk admin or disk manager or whatever that app is called??? I can only see C: FAT and FAT. it says nothing about NTFS!!????

any good sources on the net for installing 98 over NT or is it handy enough??? ive formatted 98drive before and reinstalled, but never over NT.

cheers.

Frank Grimes

Originally posted by Morphéus
would i be able to see the partition in disk admin or disk manager or whatever that app is called??? I can only see C: FAT and FAT. it says nothing about NTFS!!????

It's possible there's just two FAT partitions. NT doesn't have to be installed on NTFS.

Morpheus

ok my mistake,

NT is on the C drive, the C drive is FAT system.

There is a D partition drive of some 8 gigs, the D partition is NTFS BUT!!!! it is empty except for a hidden recycler folder with two files in it which both have GUID File names.

Would i be ok to smash that partition and change it also to FAT??

My problem is that I dont reckon I have the drivers for the hardware on the system so i would prefer if i could just install 98 over NT without the format, but again im not sure how to, im probably better off to get the drivers and format the two drives to FAT???

help please!!!!! :rolleyes:

Frank Grimes

AFAIK, you can't install 98 over NT.
Remember, FAT16 has a limit of 2 gigs per partition.
If I was you, I'd just download all the drivers for the hardware you have and burn them.
Then just format the whole drive as FAT32 and install 98.

Sleipnir

as Grimy says, you can't install 98 over NT, you will have to format the NT partition regardless.