I am in the middle of installing a 160 Gig h/d and in FDisk, I have made the Primary partition but it has only allowed me to do it as 21 gig or so. When trying to install the extended partition, it says I have no space left. Any ideas? I was thinking that the problem was the size of the Hard drive however I have a few 40 gig h/ds that I have partitioned here without any problem. I do not really want to set the size in the BIOS manually as I use different drives to boot different OS and thus need it to configure automatically.

 

Do you know if the drive is compatible with the BIOS?

Might just need a BIOS update?

 

Just checked, it recognises it correctly in POST.

 

Okay, thanks for the replies but this is the situation so far. I partitioned and formatted the drive as using Win 98 and Partitionmagic Pro 7. I then removed 98 and used the 160 gig as the master. I fdisk'd the drive, made the first partition of 8gig active and everything, including the logical drives in the extended partition appeared correct. However upon installing Windows, it crashes right at the start, giving some error message. Help, ......I'm lost here!

 

What's the error message?

 

Wot's the error message m8?

 

Hang on.......

 

Okay, this is what happens;

Scandisk C,D,E,F,G all OK,
“Preparing to run Windows” – 100%
then;
“Application error
SUWIN caused a general protection fault in module (unknown) 0367:OCCAa*
SUWIN will close”


FREEZE!!!!!!!!!!!
?

 

Ok, I'm guessing that this is happening during installation?

If I remember rightly there is a text file, setup.txt that list reasons why windows installation will fail giving an SU error. I beiliev you normally get an error number as well?

We were having this trouble with Win98 deployment for sometime, we found the problem was caused by using an IDE cable on an ATA drive. ATA cables have twice as many wires through them (everyother wire is grounded), and usually have one of the pins blanked off. Other symptons it was giving was invalid .cab files, in fact it was quite sporadic from machine to machine.

Check your cable, if it's an IDE cable, get an ATA cable. If not scan through that setup.txt file, there is a lot of advice in there if my memory serves

 

No, definately an ATA cable. Where do I find that text file?

 

In the Win98 directory i think. Certainly on the disk itself anyway

 

Oh, and I see you got a lot of other drives too, or are they just partitions. Try the drive on it's own, ie so that it is not slaved, a non-ATA drive slaved off an ATA drive can also cause probs. (the secondary IDE port is fine, don't worry bout whatever is in here)

 

No, disconnected all other drives first - only new drive connected as master.

 

It also has "Smartdrive - write behind caching"
What is this and could it be causing the hassle?

 

How are you installing it, straight off bootable CD-ROM, or some other method?

 

Yes, boot disk then CD ROM

 

It shouldn't do, this means then when data is written to HDD it isn't actually written, SMARTDRV waits till the pending data is big enough, then writes it in one chunk. It speeds up disk access by miles.

 

Excuse my ignorance but that setup text, is it on the floppy? 'cos I'm having no luck finding it

 

I don't know if this will help, but it has often proved to be more stable to me.

Boot the computer into MS-DOS using the Win98 boot CD (or disk), selecting MS-DOS mode with CD-ROM support.


Then create a directory marked Win98 on the C Drive ;

md Win98


Copy the Win98 directory from the CD-ROM into the directory you just created;

d: (CDROM)
cd win98
xcopy *.* c:\win98\ /s

nb I believe XCOPY is in the Win98 directory on the CDROM, but I cannot remember, if it isn't then find it, it's certainly in the disk somewhere.

Then run setup off the HDD

c:
cd win98
setup

This is good as well later on because windows will remember that it was installed from here, and so any susequent changes do not prompt for the win98 CD

You could try running setup without smartdrv runnning, by typing;

setup /c



Also check;

That your CPU fan has not come loose, or unplugged
All cards are in correctly
It would also pay to remove all non essential cards

Good luck

 

No, setup.txt is on the CD, I'm pretty certain it's in the Win98 directory on the CD. But it is defo on the CD.

 

Thanks for your help Zhas

 

Cool, I'm oof to bed now b4 I'm single again

Good luck

 

zhastaph, if your interested, I managed to find out what was causing the problem. It was the damn boot virus protector in the BIOS wasn't allowing it to write. All that hassle!

 

Couple of things that may/may not help;

Check that your not using the old DOS/Win95 versin of FDisk as this could only create partitions up to a maximum size of 2gig (I know you said 21, but when they are displayed as KB there are a lot of 0's)

Check that there is not already some partition space already allocated. Using display partition information, you may find there is a 140gig Non dos partition skanking your HDD space.

Also try the drive in the computer on it's own, if there is a slave in there, or it is slaved then this could be causing probs.

Hope it helps

[Edited by zhastaph - 10/12/2003 10:27:21 PM]