Install 98 on NTFS??

[systempat]

I have a question for my oldest PC. Due to a hard-drive probably dying, I have to do a re-install of Win98. I have the discs and all that I need. BUT when I try to install it says it cannot install 98 on a NTFS drive ( or partition? ) . Now the interesting thing is that both drives in the machine, a 40 gig and an 80 gig, were set up as NTFS. I think this was done when it was at the shop and the 80 gig was installed as an upgrade to replace a dead drive.
Now the question is - how did they do it? I have done a little looking and the general opinion is that you can't do it. But somebody did. Curious to see if somebody here knows how. Maybe they imaged it or something.
If I have to I will partition the 80 gig drive to NTFS. Tried to set up the 40 gig drive and the Format took forever and stopped incrementing at 72%. I think that one is bad....

[Force Flow]

There is some 3rd party software kicking around that claims to offer NTFS support on win98, but as for out-of-the-box support, no.

Run the manufacturer's diagnostic tools on the drive. Easiest place to get them all in one place is on the UBCD (ultimate boot CD)

[glc]

You cannot install 98 on NTFS. It must be FAT or FAT32. If the machine is THAT old, it may not even have bios support for drives larger than 32gb.

[systempat]

In my original post - I meant to say that if I have to I will reformat the 80 gig drive to FAT32. And partition accordingly. It sounds like max partition size is 32 gig.

Comment as to NTFS. It was working fine using the 2 drives and they were both NTFS unless my tools are lying to me. The 40 gig drive with 1 partition and the 80 gig drive as 2 partitions of 40. I had it set up as a dual boot as I was experimenting with Kubuntu Linux. So it was dual boot to either win98 or Linux. Prior to that it was just the win98 and worked fine. But I had not booted it up in the last 3 months.
The 40 gig drive is an IBM Deskstar. I'm going to try the downloaded disk utility tool on it once I create a floppy (yes) for it. But if it's dead no big deal.

[systempat]

The windows is win 98se. Does that make a difference ??

Pat

[Force Flow]

Originally Posted by systempat The windows is win 98se. Does that make a difference ?? Pat

Nope.

[systempat]

I'm not worried about the NTFS issue anymore. It does not look like it will work in Fat32 either at this point.
I have given up on the 40 gig drive as it's not worth working on. It's probably bad anyhow.
But the Win 98 machine does not like the 80 gig WD drive either. The setup from the 98 install disk runs a scan which finds bad sectors - a lot of them. When I attach the drive to the Win XP system the drive looks fine.
So there is some hardware issue on the system. I'm going to try a fresh IDE cable to see if that helps. But the motherboard may be going bad.
The rest of the system is an ASUS pentium 4 board running I think an 845 chipset. And a Celeron 2 gig CPU. So not a major investment.

Pat

[glc]

Zero fill the drives then try again. The 32gb partition limit for FAT32 only applies to 2K and XP trying to partition it - FDISK in 98 can partition the whole drive as a single partition. If it's over 64gb, you have to use percentages of drive size, there's a bug in the size reporting.

[systempat]

Zero fill using what? Sorry but I'm not familiar with that one. Up 'til now I've only ever needed FDISK and FORMAT to go thru disk problems. And a little partition magic years ago.

PAt

[glc]

www.dban.org

You can also zero fill with each manufacturers' diagnostics - use Hitachi Drive Fitness Test for the Deskstar and Western Digital Diagnostics for the WD.

DBAN and other zero fill utilities are on the UBCD too.

[systempat]

I gave up working on that motherboard. It would report disk errors on a drive that worked perfectly on the other machine. I had formatted to Fat32 and used the default 32 GB partition ( on the XP machine). On the problem machine, When the win98 setup ran the disk check it was turning up 100s of bad sectors about 10% of the way in the disk scan. I tried swapping IDE cables just in case that might be the problem. Didn't help. It has something wrong in the IDE controller or somewhere?? Beyond anything I could fix. So it is heading to the dead hardware box, I guess. Motherboard is an ASUS brand P4PE-x with an 845 chipset.

I took the 80 gb drive and reformatted it back to NTFS and put in on another computer running XP that needed more storage. Everything worked fine there. Time to buy new hardware if I want a third system running.

[glc]

What are the other components? I can point you to a good source for socket 478 motherboards.

You should run ram diagnostics.

www.memtest.org

[systempat]

Hardware list:
Celeron 2.2 Ghz in the ASUS mobo
no hard drives at this point
optical drives 1 CD burner ond DVD reader
300 W PSU think it's Allied (unfortunately)
Floppy
Video card - may be Radeon 9600
since it was running win98 I think the memory is 512 mb of ddr 333 or 400

I have a friend that might want to make a project of this. If you want to pass on a source for socket 478 boards, how about for Pentium 4 chips that would be compatible also?

[glc]

My site for boards is down right now (www.hypermicro.com) - they have a ton of genuine Intel-branded boards - and I use www.starmicro.net for processors.

I stick with standard Intel boards - they also have a lot of proprietary Intel OEM boards (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc.).