HD partition in NT

[dullard]

Please help me with partitioning a HD for a surplus computer that my office just received. It is a P3 450 MHz with a 13 GB hard drive. For licensing reasons the HD was completely erased (unpartitioned/unformatted) before we were given the computer. As I attempted to install NT I had difficulty in formating the HD. The NT setup program complained that the HD had too many cylinders (over 1024). And I had two choices a 0 MB primary partition or a 3000 GB (yes GB) primary partition. All other choices would give an error that the partition was too large. Obviously both a 0 MB and 3000 GB partition would fail to work. So I took a Win95 boot disk, and made a 2 GB FAT partition (the largest Win95 allowed), formatted it, installed NT and then created a 11 GB NTFS partition.

My question, is it possible to convert this to a single partition (the user is a computer novice and refuses to switch the HD when saving files, and thus the 2 GB will fill up quite fast)? I'm willing to reformat, reinstall, or whatever it takes.

 

[AndyHui]

For Windows NT 4.0, the first bootable partition (and the partition in which NT resides in), must be located in the first 7.6GB of the drive. This translates into the 1024 cylinder limit.

You can convert this drive into a single drive at a later date, as long as you have installed Windows NT Service Pack 4 or later.

 

[dullard]

I can install either service pack 4 or 5. So how then do I convert the drive?

 

[AndyHui]

Use Partition Magic.

 

[dullard]

Where can I obtain partition magic?

 

[AndyHui]

Most shops that sell software should have it...

PM Website

 

[SUOrangeman]

Can Ranish make an NTFS volume? Download.com should have a link to this *free* tool.

Anwyay, as long as you create and format the partition *BEFORE BOTTING WITH THE NT CD*, you should be OK. I've done this very thing with 30GB drives and installing NT4.

-SUO