Formatting Hard Drive with Win2000Pro Installed

self | Nov 21st 2001 | self

[danmar]

I usually do not post this type of stuff, but I am in need of some expert advise in this field and in return I will tell you how to fix your water pump on your car, when it starts leaking, or anything cars for that matter.(just ask the expert, 24 years in the car business and counting).

My dilema is as follows:I was running Win98 until it became very unstable(had to reboot almost every two hours)and I decided to install Win2000Pro. So I did just that, but come to find out that the new OS was installed right on top of my existing OS.At the same time my old keyboard went south, so I replaced it with a new one(Logitech with all the doodahhs)and lo'and behold the 2000 went gaga.(The machine started to reboot itself with no stopping in sight).

So I figured I have to format my hard drive and start a new.Come to find out that the system was formatting only the remaining space not the whole hard drive. So out of 10G hard drive, it showed, I have only 1.8G hard drive, because I have installed three 2000's on top of each other.

To make a long story short, I need advice as to how to format my hard drive(i bought some hard drive managing software, but they can not cut the 2000). I know for a fact that on this forum are some pretty sharp tacks, regarding computer affairs and this is the reason I am posting this vanity(I am just about to pull whatever hair is left on my head in my frustration).If anyone gets offended by this posting, I do appologise for the bandwidh waste.

[TheLooseThread]

The machine started to reboot itself with no stopping in sight

Depending on what you mean by this, I would say the problem is your keyboard, or it is plugged in wrong.

A keyboard problem during boot can cause a reboot.

[RaceBannon]

No, I had a Hewlit Packerd, less than 1.5 years old, and there were no patches for it that matched the WIN2000/ NT technology! Neither did my read/write software match, either!

The CD did work, but to do anything else with it, that was my problem. You're right, the CD did read, but all the cd read/write stuff is what died, I should have thought that through before I answered! :-)

[danmar]

...no, I just want to clean my hard drive and do a clean install of the 2000.Plain and simple ...how the hell can I format my hard drive, at this stage? 2000 does not have a DOS prompt anymore...What do I have to do to wipe my drive clean........?in 2000 enviroment.

[philetus]

Partition Magic does not partition the drive the same way windows does.

When you crash (and you will) windows won`t be able to fix it.I found this out the hard way.

I called product support(Partition Magic) and they said format and reinstall.

Which I did, minus Partition Magic.

[atafak]

Yes. He can pick up a Mandrake 8.1, ($29.95 for the three CD set) slap the #1 CD into his computer, answer a couple of quick questions, and he will be at their excellent disk partioning and formatting program. With it, he can quickly repartion/reformat the drive, and then cease the Mandrake install. Then, while MS is installing he can look over the Mandrake manual, and come to wonder why in the h*ll any sane person would use MS. He can then abort the MS installation, and install a real operating system instead.

[dglang]

Restart the install of WIN2K, your partition is still there, saved by the win2K install routine. Even partition magic cannot delete or resize it. Just do an install and WIN2k will remember what the old partition was. You can not touch it with anything until the install completes.

I have built several machines and ran into a simular problem. I even thought that I lost the partition that I was installing into. I also tried partition magic to delete the old partition and install from scratch, but WIN2K knew what it origionally tried to install into and went ahead and loaded into that partition even though it doesn't show up with FDISK or anything else.

It seems that WIN2k somehow knows what it tried to install into and protects that partition from anything elses attempts to change it.

[skr]

PRe:#12--Boy, have you got that right. Installed XP on my notebook and promptly lost my touchpad, DVD and too many incompatible programs, including one I have to have for work. Will try again later, though, when I have more time to wrestle with it. Just having my byte-box start and shut down without taking 5 minutes each way is one of my favorite features.

[vbmoneyspender]

before you wipe your Win98 install, trying boot into the command prompt (i.e. hit the 'F8' key immediately as you boot into Win98 - the best bet on this is to simply hold down the Win98 key as you boot into Win98). When you get to the command prompt (i.e. 'C:\>') - type in 'scanreg /fix'. This will fix any problems that might exist with your Win98 registry entries. If this does not fix the problem, go into your control settings (i.e. Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager) and see if any errors exist with any of your devices. If any errors are showing, try removing the device that is causing the problem and then reboot the computer and reinstall the device. If this doesn't work, then reinstall the operating systems that you want on the disk (i.e. Win 2000 and Win98.

In this regard, if you have Windows 2000 already installed, create a Windows 2000 bootdisk and copy fdisk.exe and format.com onto the disk so that you can reformat your entire drive. Then reinstall Windows 2000. Once you have done this, I think Windows 2000 has a partition manager and boot program that should allow you to install multiple Windows OS' so that you can reinstall your Win98 OS. If you can't find it, there is a free partition manager called Ranish Partition Manger that will enable you to partition your hard drive with multiple OS's on it. Once a new partition has been created and another OS installed, Windows 2000 should allow you to boot to either OS. If not, you can either get a copy of BootMagic (which comes with Partition Magic and which works very well) or you can get a freeware boot manager. I think BootIt has one, but I am not sure on this.

[philetus]

I have the CD Writer (HP) out of my old (2 yrs)HP Pavilion in a puter I built myself.It would work as a reader only.

I went on the net and searched until I found a driver that would work.

Now it`s a CDRW again.

[Jimbaugh]

1. You will need to make (4) boot floppy disks for Windows 2000
   1. Some how you will need to get to director named  boot/ on your Windows 2000 CD.  A Windows 98 SE Full Install boot disk will work for this purpose.  Email me if you need one of these. Use the programs in this director to make the boot disks for Windows 2000
2. After you have these disks use disk number one to boot your computer and follow the instructions.

 

 

[Nyralthotep]

Here is what you do. Put the Win 2000 disk in your CD rom then re-boot and access your bios. Change the first boot device to the CD-Rom, then save changes and exit. When the PC rebotts it will start Win 2k and go throgh the prompts until you get to a screen where it shows you how much space you have on your drive(s) and delete the old ones and the create new ones and format them using NTFS and proceed with the installation. This all assumes that your motherboard actually supports Win 2k because not all do, you'll need to look on their web site for more info.

I know what you mean by the continous reboot sequence. On my PC at work I have to use PC anywhere to administer some of my servers, but when I use the 9.0 full install with Win2k it almost gets to the login screen and then reboots continually. Hope this helps.

[endZT]

hehe, I thought so. I haven't used Mandrake personally but I did work for Red Hat for a few years and I did install SuSE at one point.

I figured a Mandrake user would speak up if I was wrong :)

Win2k has its uses. I have one machine for Win2k/Win98 (for work/games) and one with RH 7.2 (like I said I worked for them and it is the one I'm most familiar with) for serious stuff.

[Neanderthal]

"You should have installed Windows XP on a home computer system. Windows 2000 isn't meant for them and most computer manufacturers don't support upgrades to Win 2000 for home computers, except for certain home laptops. I'm running Windows XP and am very happy with it. Its really user friendly."

Win XP is just a glorified version of W2K, except it has a big downside with the product activation feature. I've been using W2K on 3 home computers for almost 2 years now and it's by far the best MS operating system for the home or anywhere else, unless you are into computer games.

W2K should run fine on any computer that can run XP.

[vbmoneyspender]

I have used partition magic on a number of computers and haven't experienced the problem that you have written about. In fact, once you have installed an OS on a partition, whether it has been created by fdisk (Windows or Linux) or partition magic, this really shouldn't have any effect on how the OS operates.

[endZT]

Actually, there was a bug in PM at one point that created partitions with the wrong FS type in the partition table. This was a canned answer at RHAT at the time I worked there (2 years ago) but I do not know if PM has since fixed said bug. PM has also been known (in the past) to trash partition tables to the point of no return with any OS (winnt/linux/dos). Again, this was in the past and I have used to most recent version (PM6) without any problems to migrate a win2k/win98 system from one machine to another without any problems. As PM themselves say, make sure you have a backup of all your important data before using their product.

[doomtrooper99]

I fight with Windows every day. I know this stuff from personal, painful experience. Here is what I think.

When you installed Windows 2000, you asked installer to install Windows on Win NT file system partition. Installer created Win NT partition that was about 90% the available size. Drive C: is small and is used only to do the initial boot. Win NT partition is hidden from DOS and can't be accessed from DOS.

This is what you should do.

0-BACK UP ALL YOUR DATA!!! THE FOLLOWING PROCESS DESTROYS ALL THE DATA ON THE DISK!!!

1-make a Windows startup floppy disk. I don't remember how to do it under Windows 2000 but under Win 98 go to the control panel, Add/Remove programs, Startup Disk.

2-get Partition Magic. It costs $60. It's NOT that expensive considering that this is A GREAT PRODUCT. Don't install Partition Magic on your hard drive. Make Partition Magic bootable disks. Instruction tells you how to do it.

3-Boot with Partition Magic disks and use partition magic to delete ALL PARTITIONS. Then make one big FAT32 partition that fills the entire hard disk.

4-boot with Windows startup floppy and FORMAT C: 5-remove floppy and insert Windows 2000 CD and start the PC. On MOST PC's CD drive is bootable. You might want to make sure of that first before you do anything. When the Win 2000 CD boots, follow the prompts to do a CLEAN INSTALL. I also recommend that you keep your hard drive in FAT32 format.

6-Windows 2000 has a vast library of drivers and Windows installer should install them. However, there is a chance that Windows 2000 will lack the driver you need for your modem, sound card, graphics card, etc. You might have to locate them and install them separately. If your PC is a well known brand name like HP, SONY, Compaq, visit them on the web and download the drivers.

7-Restore your data.

Happy computing.

[Jolly Green]

Just boot it with a SuSE Linux installation CD. ;)

Do you have to be so obnoxious?

[SlickWillard]

Are the drives and partitions set up as FAT32? If so, boot from a floppy and run F-disk and kill all the partitions and then create a new one using the entire drive and reinstall from that point (make sure you have a floppy that will boot the CD Rom as well). If the drive is in NTFS, then you'll need more than just a regular F-Disk to kill the drives and partitions...more along the lines of using Debug to run a low-level format...the more advanced techies here can help with that.

The big problem with killing NTFS partitions involved OS/2 and HPFS partitions - if the HPFS partition was an extended partition, then the old MSDOS 6.22 FDISK would balk at killing it. I don't know of any problem with killing primary NTFS partitions.

If the computer had been running Win98, and the partition was bigger than 2GB, then it was a FAT32 partition. The biggest problem here will be your advice to boot from a floppy - an awful lot of computers have been sold in the last few years that didn't have any boot disks included with them. A few notes:

0) BACK UP ANY FILES YOU CARE ABOUT!!!

1) If you want a full 10GB partition, then the original formatting will have to be FAT32, and this will require a Win98 boot floppy - NOT an MSDOS 6.22 boot floppy. If you have only an MSDOS 6.22 boot floppy, then you will only be able to create a 2GB FAT16 partition.

2) Boot to your old Win98 boot floppy, create your partition, format your partition, get enough of an operating system up and running so that you have CD-ROM support, with, say, your hard drive as C: and your CD-ROM drive as D:, then do the following:

a) At a DOS prompt, create a C:\i386 directory:

C:>md i386

b) Place the Windows 2000 CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive, and copy the contents of its i386 directory to your hard drive:

C:\i386>xcopy.exe D:\i386\*.* /s /e

c) Remove the CD-ROM from your CD-ROM drive, and install Windows 2000 from your hard drive, using the WINNT.EXE installation program:

C:\i386>winnt.exe

If you want an NTFS partition, then choose to convert to NTFS during the installation procedure.

WARNING#1: Windows 2000 Professional installations tend to give the group "Everyone" the "Full Access" permission to your entire hard drive. If you want to have any security at all (and that's the only reason people choose NTFS over the FATs), then you must remove that permission and replace it with something like "Administrators" and "Full Access". Once you get Windows 2000 up and running, you can see and alter these permissions by opening Windows Explorer (Start | Run | explorer.exe), right-clicking on your C: drive, scrolling to Properties, and choosing the Security tab. Of course, none of this does any good if you open email or surf the net when you are logged on as the Administrator. Create an everyday user account, and use that account for surfing the web and opening email. (PS: Here's another good trick: Rename the Administrator account using Start | Programs | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Computer Management (Local) | System Tools | Local Users and Groups | Users, right-clicking on Administrator, and choosing Rename. If you do this, then to break into your system, a hacker must not only guess the Administrator's password, but he also has to guess the new name of the Administrator.)

WARNING#2: Microsoft has seen some problems with converting large FAT32 partitions to NTFS; see e.g. Cannot Convert FAT32 to NTFS with IDE Drive Larger Than 20 GB

[paul544]

As others have stated here, you can create and use Win2k boot disks. This is a bit of pain to do. If you have a Win98 boot disk with CD rom support, boot of that disk. Run FDisk and delete all partions and drives. Then create one partition for your whole drive. Then format it. Once that is done, get into your BIOS. Make your CD Rom the boot drive. Insert the Win2K boot disk into the CD Rom and it should boot right to the Win2K install.

[vbmoneyspender]

All I can say is I used PM on a 486 that has RH, OpenLinux, Win95 and Win3.1 on it and haven't had any problems with it. I also used PM on another computer (Pentium 133) that is running 4 Win98 OS's, plus Mandrake & CorelLinux and haven't had any problems with that. All I can say is that if PM sets up a partition with the wrong filesystem on it, I think that is something that you are going to notice pretty quickly.