Please help me

[Guest]

Hi i have a computer with win nt4 and a 15 gig hard drive. Win nt only sees 2 gigs of my hard drive. what i want to do is make my c drive 10 gigs and then make two more partitions that are 1.99 gigs. how do i do this ?

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

Hi! Assuming your hard disk is properly installed/configured (in BIOS), I'd have to guess you haven't installed any WINNT Service Packs (SP). Installing SP3 would most likely fix your problem & allow Disk Administrator (found in Program Files\Admin Tools) to see your entire drive. Within Disk Admin you can partition to your hearts content. I would install the latest SP though, which is 6a. You can get the WINNT SP's here:

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/recommended/SP6/allSP6.asp

At the above site you must choose which version of SP6a (e.g, alpha or x86 cpu; high or regular encryption) fits your system. If you are planning a fresh install of WINNT & have (initial) partiton questions, lemme know & I will try & help you.


If you loan a friend $20 & never see them again, it was worth it.

 

[DSutcliffe]

The basic install of WinNT usually will not allow you to go any bigger than 2-3GB on the first install. After you install the OS, you will then be able to service pack to at least SP3 (I recommend SP5). When you use Disk administrator at that point, NT will be able to "see" the rest of the drive and format it.

At this point, you can use Partition Magic to change any drive partition on the disk, even the boot partition.

Good Luck.

Check out my rig:
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=3737" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=3737</A>

 

[ttaylor]

One approach that has worked for me is described in the MS KB article "Installing Windows NT on a Large IDE Hard Disk" at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q197/6/67.asp . It makes use of the ability to skip mass-storage recognition and use an alternate driver during the NT install.

The updated 'atapi.sys' driver from SP4 and above that handles larger disks is downloaded from an MS website as 'atapi.exe', put on a diskette and expanded. You then use this diskette when prompted. You still have the 7.8GB limitation for bootable system partitions, so the easiest thing to do is to make the first one 7.8GB or less with the rest in one or more additional partitions.

I understand there are other alternatives using Partition Magic and other products, but the above approach has worked OK for me.

Old enough to know better, too young to give a damn