503+, NTFS and large hard drive troubles....

Discussion relating to Socket 7 hardware.
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jonwest 01
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503+, NTFS and large hard drive troubles....

Post by jonwest 01 »

I've been going through hell trying to get win2k installed on a 503+ with a 40GB western digital hard drive. The win2K installer seems unable to write a partition and even when using the WD drive copy and partition utility on a different mother board once I transplant the new hd to the 503+ I get either unavailable boot drive or unavailable paging file errors as Win2K loads. Yup that's after Win2K has already started loading off of the hard drive. Strangely I've experienced none of these problems using Win98SE and FAT32. Anyone else see this? Any good clues on how to get around it? <p></p><i></i>
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jsc1973
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...

Post by jsc1973 »

Boot to plain DOS; if you don't have a bootdisk, get one at www.bootdisk.com. Partition and format the drive as FAT32 using FDISK.<br><br>After that, install Windows 2000. There's no reason you can't use Win2K and FAT32, in fact, that's what I do. (And one of my computers does in fact have a 503+ motherboard.) But if you want NTFS, the Win2K installer will give you the option to convert the drive to NTFS, just tell it to do so.<br><br>Don't use the formatting programs that any hard drive manufacturer provides, they're nothing but trouble. <p></p><i></i>
FIC VA-503+, Rev. 1.2, AMD K6-III+ 450@550MHz, 80GB Seagate ATA-100, 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV, TB Montego II Quadzilla, Win98se, 384MB PC100

Compaq Presario 1273, AMD K6-III+ 450@400MHz 1.8v, 40GB Samsung 5400RPM, extremely hacked Win98SE, 288 (yes, 288!) MB RAM
(Also an AMD FX-8350, which does the heavy lifting these days...)
io333
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bios

Post by io333 »

you may need to flash the bios to the last one they put out for that board. I remember that the older bios versions had problems with large hard drives. <p></p><i></i>
jonwest 01
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Post by jonwest 01 »

Thanks for the advice everyone...the secret is to tell the BIOS to bbot to SCSI before IDE and then install Win2K, providing the special IDE drivers at the appropriate time.
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jsc1973
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Post by jsc1973 »

I'd forgotten all about that problem, I ran into it too. Glad you figured it out. Win2K and FAT32 craps out when you don't install the drivers for a third-party IDE controller, too.
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