Re: NT and disk hardware configuration problem

Dan O., William, Louis, UZnal and Elar:
....

This is on a PC300GL (6591-60U). Its got two IDE drives, the first
having 7546MB; the second having about 6000MB. In DOS, I partitioned
the drives into 15 logical drives. I set up DOS and Windows for
Workgroups in drives C: - F:.

I then installed Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. It did fine on the first
round. It then rebooted, resumed set up, announced "checking hardware"
and immediately,

OS Loader v4.00
Boot record signature AA55 not found (0000 found).

Windows NT could not start because of a computer disk hardware
configuration problem.
Cound not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk
hardware.
Please check the WIndows NT (TM) documentation about hardware disk
configuration and your hardware refverence manuals for additional
information.

....

Thanks for all this information. There's a lot of material to digest,
but I'll start with the idea that the Boot Partition is too far from
the disk beginning.

Dan O.: I've never before been flamed in such a courteous and gentle
manner. Thank you. I'll try to learn from it.

As a matter of mitigation, you should know I had this boot problem for
at least a day before posting to the newsgroup. I tried 3
installations and in between, completely cleared out the disk. There
was no point in describing these dead ends since they didn't solve the
problem.

I've never been satisfied with results from Knowlege Base and so I
don't use it. The PC750, an NT server has had a problem -- on bootup
it announces that it can't load device driver
G:\Winnt\system32\remon.sys. I did a search on remon.sys and nothing
came up.

For this problem, the error message was 55 words long. If I were to do
a search, I wouldn't know how to phrase it.

Dan O. says, "I kind of felt like a lot of pertinent detail was left
out the problem description."

Without knowing what's going on, I don't know what facts are relevant
and what facts aren't. So, with what I know now, here's a summary.

This system uses 2 HDDs. The first is an IBM DHEA 38451. It is listed
as over 8GB but, with jumpers, I got it down to under 8GB. I typically
install DOS and WFW in partitions C:-F: and then put more advanced
operating systems in later partitions. I've never had disks this big.

And by the way, I intend to install OS/2 after Windows NT and Windows
2000 Professional.

As mentioned, I had several unsuccessful attempts to install Windows NT
4.0 workstation. The first try was unsuccessful because I didn't have
the key. The second and third were unsuccessful because of this error
that I'm writing about.

On the second try, the installation routine noted that one of the
partitions (J:) wasn't formatted. I let it do the formatting and then
tried installation on J:. Then I wondered if that stuff with J: and
shrinking the drive capacity might be related to this error.

On the third try, I attempted to install Windows NT in G:. Again,
there was another problem that might have been related. G: has the
volume "AP" and the DOS command LABEL is unable to change this volume.

The boot partition, C: is 604MB. Logical partitions D:, E: and F: are,
respectively 400MB, 1255MB and 1255 MB. Thus, G: starts at 3514MB from
the beginning. G: has 753MB. H: and I: have 1255MB and 753MB,
respectively. J: starts 6275 MB from the beginning. J: is 1271MB.
The total of all these partitions is 7546MB.

Enough detail? Any more problems based on this description?

Dan the K.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive Not Recognized
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  • Re: 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive Not Recognized
    ... I tried to install the motherboard driver utility from the original CD- ... ROM within Windows. ... LifeGuard to find out if it sees the drives. ... Then just update the drivers if newer versions are available on the web site ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive Not Recognized
    ... I tried to install the motherboard driver utility from the original CD- ... ROM within Windows. ... LifeGuard to find out if it sees the drives. ... Then just update the drivers if newer versions are available on the web site ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
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