Obliterated my Win98SE C: drive adding Win2K Pro

[Maetryx]

Maetryx here,

I decided recently to add Win2k Pro to my system. I used Partition Magic 4.0 to create a 10 Gigabyte partition at the tail end of my 40GB drive. I set that partition active and rebooted into the Win2k Pro CD. I went through the blue initial screens, and chose that NTFS partition to install win2k into. But it insisted on reformatting the partition. No problem, I let it do that.

It got to the point where it wants to reboot and I let it reboot.

THE END. It didn't work right ever again. If I left the win2k CD in, it just started up the install all over again. I tried resetting the C: drive active and booting back into Win98SE but that just made the computer sit there and say NTLDR not found on boot up.

I booted with the win98se CD and it ran scandisk. If found an error with the FAT tables and repaired them, and set some bit back to MS-DOS/Win98 or something instead of NTFS. But it was screwed. The partition came up as a FAT12 after that when I ran FDISK. I'm certain it was a FAT32 before. And it was a Non-DOS partition after win2k dorked with it.

I don't know. Somewhere betwen Partition Magic, Boot Magic, Scandisk, FDISK, and Win2k I hosed up hard. I'm currently starting the whole thing from scratch. For varieties sake I'm instlaling Win2k Pro in the first partition, and I'll skip Win98se altogether.

 

[westyellmt]

". . .I set that partition active and rebooted into the Win2k Pro CD."

It is not necessary to set that partition active. It would have worked fine if installed on a logical drive within the extended partition.
However now that your hosed I think that eliminating W9x and just installing W2k is a good decision as long as all your apps and hardware are compatible with W2k.
Harry

 

[Joemonkey]

well i can explain a part of the problem... fdisk says that the partition is non-dos because you formatted it in NTFS.

you could have saved the whole partition magic problem by just booting up to the win2k CD, telling it to create a partition in your space, and to let it format it itself.

 

[Maetryx]

Cool. Thanks for advice, as I apparently need it (doh!). I didn't realize that Win2k Pro would do the partitioning by itself.

The partitions I had set up were like this:

Primary partition C: Win98SE 8GB FAT32
Extended partition
Logical drive D: downloads 11GB FAT32
Logical drive E: music 11GB FAT32
Primary partition (?) win2k 10GB NTFS

That's what I tried to do. But if I am understanding it correctly now, I could hav made an F: Logical drive and it would have installed into it? Is there a problem with being beyond the 1024th cylinder in my setup? It's academic now, because I'm just going with win2k pro.

 

[duragezic]

What westyellmt said.

I just installed Win2k two days ago and I created a 5gb logical partition at the end of my 27.3gb in Partition Magic and had PM format it to NTFS. My win98 c: partition was still the primary and you just run the win2k setup from windows and then choose clean install and select the drive. Then it reboots and installs in DOS.