How do i get windows NT 4.0 to see the whole harddrive?

[DDCSpeed]

Hello,

If anyone can help me solve this problem, it would be big thanx to the person. I am installing windows NT 4.0 but I cannot get the OS to see the whole harddrive capacity. It is currently limited at 4 gig but its max is 10 because the OS can only see 4 gigs.

 

[corkyg]

That is a well known problem with NT4. Make sure you have all the Service Packs installed . . . I think through #6. They may have fixed it. You would be a lot better off with W2K.

 

[DDCSpeed]

I have installed up to service pack 6a but I still can only see about 4 gigs of the harddrive.

 

[Shadow07]

Have you created the other partition through Disk Manager?

 

[Nothinman]

If it's not the OS drive you can create the partition in PQMagic and NT will use it fine, Disk Manager strangely says it's a 10G partition on a 4G disk but it works.

If it is the OS partition and you're still in the process of installing, you have to pull atapi.sys from SP4 (or up), run winnt to start the install in DOS, replace the atapi.sys in the install dir with the one from SP4 then reboot and it should be OK.

 

[xfactordomine]

DDCSpeed,

That is normal. If installing to an IDE hdd, NT creates a DOS partition during the setup process and thus cannot see above a 4gb partition.
You can use third party software to resize the partition after the install, as long the boot partition is 7.8gb or smaller.
The boot partition has to be 7.8gb or smaller because of interupt 13 BIOS limitations, and because NT boot-time drivers don't support virtual head translation.

This isn't the case when installing NT on a SCSI hdd. =)

 

[Shadow07]

xfactordomine is correct in this. With SCSI translation, the BOOTLDR uses the SCSI's driver to make the low-level HD calls, rather than relying on INT13. If the drive is an IDE drive, then I would do this:

1. Make the Floppy Boot Disks
2. Get a copy of Service Pack 4 or later.
3. Copy the ATAPI.SYS file from the CD to the floppy that has this file.
4. Run the Install from the floppies.

Or

Follow the directions in KB Article Q197667.

The newer ATAPI.SYS file had an issue finding larger drives than 7.8GB.