The motherboard is a Abit VP6 Dual FCPGA board.

It has a onboard ATA100 controller and a High Point 370 ATA100 Raid controller.

I installed my WD 40 gig drive on the ATA100 controller and I couldn't make my BIOS recognize the damn drive.

So I moved it to the ATA100 drive and it picked it up fine! Yippy! BUT, then Windows 2000 wouldn't boot. (This was left over Windows 2000 that I was going to re-install)

Now, I can't get to my files to re-install or even boot.

So I throw a 4 gig drive on IDE1 that already has ME installed. I get up in that fine and start Win2k Setup.

I install Win2k to the 40gig drive.

Now Win2k/NT always puts the boot info on Hard Disk 0 no matter what. So I move those files over to the 40 gig drive. I change to boot.ini so that it will start.

I remove the 4 gig drive, boot up just fine from the 40 gig drive, but it show the first local drive (boot/system drive) as drive F:

This is unacceptable. Sooooooooooo, I start the install over again and when I get to the point of configuring my drives, it will NOT let me delete and re-create the boot partition.

What the fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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jim
Beauty is in the eye of the Beer Holder
Brews and Cues

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"I'm not dumb. I'm smart in my own way."

Well, maybe the ATA100 BIOS one.

The way to fix my problem currently is to install from the CD, this will allow me to delete, create, and format the boot partition.

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jim
Beauty is in the eye of the Beer Holder
Brews and Cues

Beyond that, just do a clean install. Put only one drive in the system (that you want the OS on), and do a clean install including a repartition and format. Then, after install is done, and video drivers are installed... etc, start introducing drives into the system. Do backups of the drives as they come in, and redo the partition and format them. No sense in making a new computer if you aren't going to get rid of all remnants of the old one.

Mike

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-- incubus
As I chase the leaves like the words I never find ...

quote:

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I found out the hard way that you can't change the fact that SCSI comes before IDE.

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hold up. i am fairly sure that ide comes before SCSI. the scsi takes longer to 'boot up' because it has to go through the scsi card and shit, and the ide is already there. i know that my ide drive is read before my scsi.

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"I'm not dumb. I'm smart in my own way."

quote:

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Originally posted by hal0:
i am fairly sure that ide comes before SCSI

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Couldn't tell you for sure, but working with this God Damned Compaq server at work, that seems to be the rule. It's a good thing I'm not smart enough about networks to know what I'm doing, because it's running now... with the boot partition on a RAID array, and the OS on an IDE drive. I'm flippin bright, eh?

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"I'm not dumb. I'm smart in my own way."

You need to copy those drivers to a floppy, and then press F6 when prompted by setup. It happens almost as soon as Setup boots, so you have to be quick about it.

Hope this helps.

I didn't have the CD so I was trying to load from an existing hard drive that has 2 partitions, a boot partition and my big ass file partition.

I also had no bootable floppies, and no bootable CDs at home.

That is why I had to go the back-asswards way about getting it installed. This is also why the main drive ended up as F:

The problem was getting the F: to be C: WITHOUT the CD.

Let me be clear about this again. You have NO CD, NO BOOTABLE FLOPPY, A HARD DISK WITH WINDOWS ME ON IT, A HARD DISK WITH AN INCOMPATABLE SETUP OF WIN2K, A PARTITION WITH THE WIN2K SETUP FILES ON IT.

How do you get Win2k installed?

You can't boot to the Win2k Drive because you have no way of properly configuring the boot.ini to boot from the proper place.

You have to at least get to a DOS prompt to begin the setup of Win2k from the setup files.

Since you have NO Bootable CD, No Bootable Floppy, you have to use the trusty ole Win ME Hard drive to at least get into windows. Then you can launch the setup. So then you install over the the incompatable Win2k Setup by deleting and re-creating the partition. BUT! Since you were in Win ME at the time with an extra hard drive installed it makes the Win2k Setup on the F:. Now you remove your old Hard Drive but you are still booting to drive F: So now you want to try another clean install wiping the F: partition and re-creating it. Well, it won't let YOU!!!

The solution was simply to go get the CD from work.

I was looking for a way to do it with NO CD!!

Hope that all made sense. I know about specifiying my mass storage device, I know how to use the boot.ini to tell it to boot from which IDE/RDISK/PARTITION...

Thanks anyway though.....

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jim
Beauty is in the eye of the Beer Holder
Brews and Cues