NT install fails due to too many cylinders on HD

[Mike Share]

I am trying to install NT4.0 on a Kayak XA7 PIII with a 10.1Gb Quantum HD.
Setup fails every time after the mass storage detection blue screen, saying the
HD has 1304 cylinders and setup cannot continue with a drive over 1024
cylinders. Is this because the NT4.0 driver for the IDE controller is too old ?
Any fixes greatly appreciated. Please email to mike_share@hotmail.com

[Jamie Hughes_1]

Hello Mike,

The issue you describe is a known problem that has been reported to both
Microsoft and HP. Please see the attached URL for more information on the
problem and the workaround / solution. Although this article does not list
your specific model, I'll bet you have one of the disk drives that are listed
in your machine.

HP has also released a utility to change the Maxtor and Seagate drives from 15
to 16 heads but I cannot locate the utility for your specific model. Please
review this URL and then you should post a question in the Kayak User Forum or
call their support line and ask them to send you the utility for your model
Kayak (or you can check with the vendor of the specific disk drive for the
fix.)

Regards,
Jamie Hughes

HP User Community Forum
http://forum.support.hp.com

Then choose the link for Kayak support. If you have the Maxtor or Seagate
drive, I would just go to their website and get the fix directly from them.

[Gerard Laygui]

Mike,

According to Microsoft, the maximum size that a SYSTEM partition in Windows NT
4 can be is 7.8GB due to reasons mentioned in TechNet Article Q114841. Also
mentioned is that during the initial install, FAT rather than NTFS is used.
Because of this, FAT's limit of 4GB holds back the size of the system partition
to roughly 4GB. You might want to try using a smaller system partition size
during the installation of Windoes NT 4 to fix your problem.

Regards,

Gerard

[Mike Share]

The BIOS is set to AUTO and the correct HD is detected OK. I have been running
Quantum's disk manager which creates a 2Gb FAT partition for NT Server 4.0. I
then reboot, load NT installation diskettes, update the atapi.sys from sp4,
then after the mass storage detection it always errors out. First it says that
the HD had more than 1024 cylinders then :

"setup was unable to locate the hard drive partition prepared by the MS-DOS
portion of setup. When you run the DOS Nt setup program you must specify a
temporary drive that is supported by NT. setup cannot continue."

Any more ideas ?
Thanks, Mike Share.

[Gerard Laygui]

Mike,

1. Remove the Disk Manager Software provided by the HDD manufacturer.

2. Set the BIOS to autodetect and use LBA (Large Block Addressing) on the HDD.

3. Use a Windows 95 DOS disk (FDISK)to create an initial FAT 16 partition of
2GB. Make sure that this partition has also been set active.

4. The Windows NT System should be installed to this partition.

Hope this helps you out,

---Gerard

[Richard Mason_4]

I am trying to ghost an image on a kayak xa 05 p3 serial number us002555182.
the image is one that our
company create, I have not experience any problem with
the kayak xm or vectra. after the ghost process, i receive the blue screen -
crashbug. in the ghost process i receive a cookie that states the 1 partition
is larger than 7.875 gb and will not be bootable this is a winnt limitation. I
edit the partition to 4.gb
fdisk the HD and still nothing blue screen of death.
inaccessible device. can you help thanks