Win2K Install Issues

[Lawrence Tse]

Although I don't know too much about WD HDD characteristic, but I believe
the disk management utility you mentioned may not be a Win2K driver. If
this is the case , the drive is usable in DOS mode and even can be
paritioned as you want. However, when the system is rebooted, Windows take
over the drive detection task which may comes to unexpected behavior like
what you're facing.

I wondered if you boot the Win2K installation from CD, can it detect the
full size of the disk. If it can detect up to a reasonable portion of the
space, it's recommended to leave it like that and create another partition
after Win2K is successfully installed.

If you insists to fully utilitize the HDD, try locating a Win2K version of
driver from vendor, during the setup program initialize, press "F6" to load
the driver using floppy disk, this may resolve the problem.

 

[Lawrence Tse]

*I think* the disk detection and access behavior have not be heavily changed
and the major difference between 2K & XP should be the supported hardware
have been increased. So, installing Win2K again from scratch may bring some
luck to you.

I think not only formatting the entire disk, what I suggested is to delete
all the disk paritions and re-create again. That's a recommended way if
data is already backup and previous installation was facing boot problem.

Regards,

 

[Guest]

I am attempting to install Win2K on a Dell Optiplex GX1 with a PII 350 w/
384Mb of RAM. The HDD is a WD 80GB 7200 rpm w/ 8Mb Cache. For the mother
board to recognize the full size I had to install WD disk management utility.
The base install went well but as Windows was loading to complete the
installation, it's hanging on the splash screen w/ no movement on the
activity bar.

I attempted to install WindowsXP first, but due to incapadibility issues
with the onboard video drive, the OS ran painfully slow and was unable to
clear up the issues.

Any suggestions would be great.

 

[Guest]

Would this have changed from Win2K to WinXP? Although the WinXP was
extreamly slow both installing and running, it had no problems initializing
the HDD. Since the core of the OS is already installed, would it work just
to delete the 2Mb partition cantaining the WD drive utility, or should I
Format the entire disk and reinstall Win2K from scatch?

 

[Guest]

Went ahead and deleted all partitions on the disk and reinstalled Windows 2K.
Windows recognized the entire size of the disk. I went through the
installation process, and had no issues with the core installation. When it
got to the starting up... splash screen, it again froze up and showed no
further process or movement on the activity screen.

Since Windows has not yet completed the installation, would there be any
benefit to booting into Safe Mode? Can Windows complete the installation
while loaded in Safe Mode.

Thanks for the help so far.