w2ksp3 won't install on fat32 partition?

[gellfexx]

I was trying to do a minor upgrade on my folks Dell L400s p400 system by adding a WD800BJ drive and then running w2ksp3 in off a bootable all-in-one cd for a dual boot setup. I recall doing this years ago on my p120 succesfully. I put the drive as slave on the cd drive's cable.The FAT32 partition worked fine in their current w98 install.

Problem was that the w2ksp3 wouldn't see the drive as formatted by the WD utility I used, said it was unformatted or corrupt and wanted to format it ntsf, which would render it unusable by the w98 boot.

Any ideas where I pooched it, besides getting involved to begin with?

Thanks

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've never had a problem installing W2K onto a FAT32 drive.

Something else is going on there, perhaps. When you say that you formatted it, using a WD utility - how old is this format utility program? Pentium II 400Mhz.. hmm. I'm thinking that perhaps that system doesn't support 80GB HDs natively, and so the WD program is using a drive-overlay to get it to recognize the full size. Older versions of the drive-overlay software, replaced the boot sector, and may be incompatible with W2K. If that turns out to be the case here, then I suggest creating two partitions, a small one under 8GB in size, to use for the OS as a boot partition, and then once you get the OS installed, using the Disk Management tool to create an extended partition and a logical drive with the remaining space, and use that for storage. (Make sure to back up anything that might be important before you do that, of course.)

Either that, or obtain a PCI IDE controller card with its own BIOS, like a Promise Ultra100/133 TX2 card, and attach the HD to that. In that case, you won't need the WD formatting software. Btw, the W2K CD should be bootable, if that system supports booting off of a CD-ROM. (it should, I think.)

PS. Did you check Dell's web site, to see if that system has the most current BIOS, and whether that BIOS will support HDs of that size (80GB)?

 

[gellfexx]

Thanks Larry.

It seems that dell was no longer supporting this model on their site as far as I could tell. I knew the bios could be an issue as I'd dealt with that on a p133 system. The WD software was what came with the new drive! I had liked using Maxblast in the past so I downloaded the most recent to find it the same program as WD, with the same results.

I suspect you're right about this bios & overlay stuff. So this would result in my seeing & using a 80g partition in 98 just fine? I need to learn more about it before taking my next shot at this one.

I should just convince them to drop $350 on another cheapo Dell.