Win2k Question

Stephen

Ok... My machine here has got two hard drives installed at the moment - soon to be three. One of the drives is a scsi drive and the other is an IDE.

When I want to do a clean install of win98, i have to physically remove the IDE drive (can't go fdisking it, got stuff backed up to it) in order for the scsi drive to be C:.

I tried installing NT4 before - it worked fine until I reinstalled the IDE drive, at which point everything went a bit pear shaped and I ended up reinstalling win98.

What i'm wondering is, will win2k have the same problems if I install it on an NTFS partition? Should I install it on a fat32 partition instead? And, will 2k, like 98 require me to physically take out the (slower) IDE drive in order to use the faster scsi drive as C ?

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- Munch

Leverz

Well, never mind about it being C: etc, but if you want to boot from it you will just have to change a BIOS setting and you should be flying. Instead of booting A,C, CDROM have it A,SCSI,CDROM or what ever tickles your fancy.

_CreeD_

Aye, there should be a BIOS option for SCSI or external-card.
If not try disabling the entire IDE primary controller (Not just the Autodetect options for the HDD as Win2k will see through this) and then give it a go. But then you might still have a problem with drive letter assignments when you're done. Probably all Moot, that Xeon board is meant to be a server so it should definitely have the SCSI/External option.

Renton

Aye tis a common problem,

Firts of all, avoice NTFS like the plague unless you're planning to run a server. Its utterly sh!te.

Erm as for making your SCSI as the c:, I dont think that changing the boot sequence in the bios would affect the drive allocations.

Windows NT based operating systems have the facility to remap Hard Drives . I.E. c: <> d: ... Also if you can use LILO. you can remap them. You'll have to ask a linux expert tho..

Good luck

RentZ

WhiteWashMan

have no idea about scsi, so a quaetion along the same lines....
will ssi be recognised in fdisk?
as in, can it be setup as an active partition.
umm, long time since i did, you can only fdisk the master drive cant you?
so, i guess setting scsi in bios as first boot will bring it up as primary hard drive in fdisk?
yes/no?

Gerry

I'd agree with creed here, NTFS is far better. Its more reliable, and is much faster, at least on my machine. Win2k can read fat32 as well, so my fat32 partition co-exists perfectly with my NTFS one.

As for the win2k install, it is quite flexible. It will let you install onto whatever drive you want, but some startup files will be placed onto your c: drive either way. On my machine, I have win2k installed onto the e: partition, so some startup files go onto the c: partition. If c: was a seperate, slower drive I suppose this would slow the boot process a little. It also means that if you can't get your scsi drive to be c:, and you install win2k on it, the ide drive will hold the startup files, and if the first partition on the ide drive is damaged, so is your win2k install. The best thing to do would actually be to disable the ide drive in the bios before installing win2k, then all the win2k files will go on the scsi drive, including the boot sector and boot.ini. Set the bios to boot off the scsi first, and you should have no problems.

SickBoy

I have 2 IDE and 1 SCSI drive in my system, OS is Win2k. My C: is the SCSI.
Do what Gerry said...

_CreeD_

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Renton:
Aye tis a common problem,

Firts of all, avoice NTFS like the plague unless you're planning to run a server. Its utterly sh!te.</font>

Eh, Renton? NTFS is a hell of a lot more efficient then Fat/fat32, it's only real problem is not being able to troubleshoot a failed boot partition from floppy (Without specific utils).

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
Erm as for making your SCSI as the c:, I dont think that changing the boot sequence in the bios would affect the drive allocations... - Windows NT based operating systems have the facility to remap Hard Drives . I.E. c: <> d: ... </font>

As I said if you can change the boot options in the BIOS you're fine - however if he had to go with the 2nd option of 'hiding' (Or removing) the IDE drive, you will be installing the operating to what it thinks is C. When you return the IDE drive that will change. While you can remap drives in NT it only takes effect IN NT, not at the boot sector level. You could modify the Boot.Ini to point to the new drive and partition but you would need your bootsector and boot files on the drive the BIOS is trying to boot to (Which in this scenario is the IDE).

Balfa

btw, whitewash, i know nothing about scsi either, but i do know that A) fdisk can work on any drive in the system, and in your question about active partition, you're confusing partitions with physical drives you choose boot device first, to select the scsi drive, then use fdisk to set the active partition -within- that drive.

Stephen

Thanks for the tips.

Still haven't attempted the install yet

Stephen

Well, I've now got Win2k installed with SP1 and various new drivers, such as the nvidia detonator 12.20's (which appear to be working a treat... faster than the 11.01's on WinME). Currently the SCSI drive with win2k installed on it is NTFS, while the IDE is still FAT32. I'll probably convert the IDE to NTFS later on. The odd thing is... after Win2k installed to the SCSI disk (as drive C) it swapped the HD drive letters after installation was complete, so my system disk is now D rather than C... that said it seems to be working perfectly, not one crash or other win9x style oddity yet...

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- Munch

Gerry

hehe, another win2k convert. Only prob I've found is it doesn't seem to like isa stuff very much ( well at least the modems and NIC's I have here ).

Stephen

Win2k seemed to choke on my poxy winmodem - it took an awful lot of f*cking about to finally make it work... but no matter, i'll be rid of the poxy winmodem soon enough