me again

[xLSx]

alright, i tried to just run win2k off the the cd. it booted up went to the set up screen, then said something along the lines, no drives found. this is what i expected because i believe the harddrive has never been formatted.

and then i went to the bootdisk pages, and it says it has 4 boot disks, and that its used for repairing. the computer has never been set up, all brand new.

can someone please give me step by steps, or just a page that can do it. im really lost heh =(.

thanks in advance.

 

[jlanka]

if you boot off the CD, you can format the disk right from there. Alternatively you can boot from a <A HREF="http://www.bootdisk.com" target="_new">98 boot diskette</A> fdisk and format with FAT32, then run winnt.exe in the the i386 directory and either convert to NTFS or just leave it FAT32.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[xyz]

O.K. I explain.
"Computer is all brand" new means that your Hard disk is not partitioned. The best way to partition a hard disk is by using "FDISK". FDISK is present in Win98 startup disks, and in Win98 CD also. If you don't have a startup disk, you can make it right now on any computer setup with Windows98. OR if you have a Win98 CD (bootable) then you can even use that.
First of all go into BIOS Setup, and Autodetect the Hard drives.
Boot your computer either from Win98 bootable CD or Startup disk, and at the command prompt type "FDISK".
If you need, here is <A HREF="http://fdisk.radified.com/" target="_new">Fdisk guide to Hard drive partitioning</A>
Partition your hard disk into as many partitions as you want.
Now it's the time to boot off Win2000 CD, this time you would get no more messages saying, "No drives found"
Win2000 setup will offer you to format your Hard disk and the file system which you want. If you are planning to setup NT based Operating sytems only on this computer, then format the hard disk under NTFS.
Install Win2000 and enjoy.

<b><font color=red><i>"All delays are dangerous in war."</b></font color=red></i>

 

[r2k]

Yesterday I bought a new HD and the Windows 2000 CD had no problems in finding that it was all empty and not partitioned. So it gave me the choice to create and format the partitions.
I mean the 2K CD should do all this by itself as the first thing in the setup process. No need for Fdisk, boot diskettes, etc.

 

[Toejam31]

The installation CD has some limitations. It can't create an unlimited number of partitions, and it can't create a partition over 32GB in size if the file system is FAT32. Because of this, many people still prefer using an updated version of <A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q263044" target="_new">FDISK</A> that can recognize large hard drives. FDISK is also useful for creating partitions if more than one hard drive is in a system, instead of using the Win2K Disk Management tools to mount a volume, or a program like Partition Magic.

Personally, I prefer to partition the disks in DOS, and format the active partition with the installation CD. Then I format the other partitions from within the GUI. It seems to give me the most consistent results from system to system, overall.

Toejam31

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[xyz]

As Toejam pointed out some of the limitations of Windows Installation CDs for partitioning the hard drives, there are many more such reasons for Why people still prefer manual partitioning using 'FDISK'.
Plus, FDISK is simple in use, you can never have any problem while using it, less management is required and .......... lot more reasons why I love FDISK and recommend it to others.

<b><font color=red><i>"All delays are dangerous in war."</b></font color=red></i>

 

[jlanka]

FDISK is simple in use, you can never have any problem while using it,

unless of course you accidentally delete a partition you didn't want to (fastest way to trash data known to man). Which I did a number of years ago. I learned to be VERY cautious when deleting a partition.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>