Windows NT to Windows 98 NTSC vs. FAT32

[ashardin]

I bought one of those bartop cabinets (Merit Pit Boss) and I'm MAME'ing it to give to my nephews for Christmas (they come over to play my fullsize all of the time, but the parent's don't have room for a full size cabinet, this is a perfect solution).

Any, back to the problem. I bought a used 400 mhz Hewlett Packard machine and I'm having a problem with it. Its got Windows NT on it right now, and has not been formatted (what a bad idea, who knows what could be on this computer). At bootup, it comes to the NT login screen, complete with the name of the last user, obviously, I don't know the password.

I can't format it, since NT uses a different file structure than Win 98, and when I boot with my DOS floppy, DOS will not recognize it either.

So I cannot format the drive from Windows NT, and cannot recognize it from DOS either, what to do?

Is there a bootable utility that will allow me to do what I need? I want to wipe it clean in FAT or FAT32 format so I can load Windows 98.

I think my worse case is to pull the drive, and plug it in my XP machine as a slave and use drive manager to format it in FAT32. I'm just wondering if there is a better way.

As an aside, I think this will be a fun project.  Space is at a minimum in this cabinet, so I'm going to have to be creative in cramming that cpu in the cabinet.  I' m getting rid of the case, and mounting the cpu components on small wood shelves inside the cabinet, at the back.  I want to get the machine completely config'ed and backed up before I start doing this.  The Pit Boss used a 9" arcade monitor, I got a 9" VGA monitor (POS use mainly) off of ebay for $40 and I'm going to use that.  I know they measure differently so the size will be a little different but a custom monitor mount and bezel should fix that.  I was a little worried about resolution for ArcadeOS on the 9", it would be hard to see the games.  the VGA goes up to 800x600 so it should be fine.  As far as the computer monitor being too "sharp" on the graphics compared to an arcade monitor, that is a tradoff I'll live with.  I'll put something in the project announcements when I get rolling.

[Malachai]

Boot up with that DOS floppy and use fdisk to delete the partition.  It will be  the "Delete non-DOS partition" option.  Then you can create a new partition and format it with FAT32, or just reboot and run the Win98 setup.  Hope that helps.

[JackTucky]

Dos Fdisk should be able to delete the partition that is there and recreate a FAT one.  Did you try Fdisk?

If not, if you have a Win98 bootable CD, that should let you delete the partition, create a Fat32 and install.

Art

[ashardin]

Didn't try Fdisk, although C: is only recognized as a ramdrive when I boot.  Will fdisk ignore that and format it?

Sorry I'm hazy on this, my DOS days are well behind me.

[JackTucky]

Agreed, DOS days are hazy, but I had some pretty messed up partitions and FDISK just hosed 'em.  You have to confirm like 3 times, but it worked for me.  Good luck.

[sac01]

Fdisk will delete it even if c: isn't the HD at the moment.. just boot on a floppy, run fdisk, and select delete non dos partition, then create a logical dos partition, then reboot, and format drive c:.

You must reboot before you format

good luck

[Chris Goodwin]

FDISK works based on the physical media rather than drive letters.  It will tell you what letter is mapped to what drive if it can, but I've seen instances where that's been messed up.  

[Howard_Casto]

You can't go by the lettering at all, you need to go by the volume labels.  This is why it's important to always label your drives.

[ashardin]

Followed Sac01's recommendations, but didn't have much luck.  When I first started fdisk I had  3 partitions, a 5 gig NTFS, 1.7 gig FAT32, and a 8 MB Dos that was labeled as c:.  I removed the NTFS, but could not get rid of the FAT32 (I did reboot).  It kept saying I had a logical DOS partition, but when I tried to delete the logical DOS partition it said none existed?  So I could not change any of the other partitions.  Reformatting would only reformat the 8MB that is showing as c:.

So as it stands now it shows 2 partitions

1         1700 MB    FAT32
2    C:       8  MB    DOS

So it has gotten rid of the NTFS partition, but now its unrecognized.

I appreciate the help so far, hopefully I can get this squared away.

[CitznFish]

whenever I get into a situation like this I grab a copy of Fdisk from redhat. It'll work better than the version that comes with DOS, and you can find it online for free.

[sac01]

did you try deleting the 8mb partition?

[ashardin]

It won't let me delete the 8mb partition.  Says that there is a logical DOS partition.

When I go to delete the logical DOS, it says none exists.

There lies my conundrum.

Can I pull the damn drive, plug it in to my XP machine, and use XP to wipe the thing and format as FAT32 so I can reinstall it and install 98 on the drive in the new box?

[SirPeale]

I can only assume there is just one drive in the system.  So I'll write these instructions based on that.

Boot off your Windows 98 start disk.  I'm assuming by what you wrote it's one that gets made when you install the system, yes?

After booting (choose to boot without CD driver options) and you're at the command prompt, type 'fdisk' and you'll be given some choices.  I believe the choice you want, delete partitions, is choice '4.'  Select it.  

I believe it'll show you a list of the partitions.  Since you don't want any of the partitions that are on there now, delete them all, one by one.  You'll likely have to go in each time to delete each additional one.  Don't exit out of fdisk until they're all gone.

Once they're all gone, go to 'create new partition' (option 1?) and make your partition.  Since the drive is so small, I'd use the maximum space possible.

Then, set the 'active' partition.  Exit out of fdisk, and reboot.

Once you're back at the DOS prompt (again, without CD support) format the drive, with 'FORMAT c: /s'.  This should work, I don't think I left anything out.

[sac01]

i'm not sure why fdisk isn't working for you, but to make matters simpler, what brand HD is this?? For instance, if it's a maxtor, you could just use maxblast to set it up, other HD manufacturers have prgs (floppys) for their Hd

Try going to the website of the manufacturer, and DLing the utility floppy.

[gndprx]

You have to delete logical and extended partitions before you can delete primary partitions.

Just list the partitions...then delete the extended partitions and logical partitions first and then go and delete the primaries until you are down to a single unpartitioned drive space.

Then create a new primary partition and set the size...if you are going with 98, I believe you are limited to 4Gb for any FAT partition.  If you format FAT32, I think you can go past 4Gb, NT/2000/XP NTFS or FAT32 you can size however you like, so fdisk accordingly.

exit Fdisk, reboot to the 98 or dos boot disk and format the newly created partition.  

Done...

[ashardin]

Endgame:  Nothing I tried worked.  It wasn't a Maxtor drive, but I tried maxblaster anyway (what the hell could I lose?).

Worked perfectly.  Thanks for all the help here.  Now I'm up and running, I've got Win98 loaded, working on the damn drivers now...

Thanks guys.

[JackTucky]

I answered your question earlier, it didn't help, and I found myself doing this tonight.  I had the same problem you had! (I think)

I tried to delete the logical drives, said no logical drives existed.

I tried to delete the partition, said logical drives existed!

Maxblaster did the trick for me too.

Art

[ashardin]

Yep Art, that is exactly what happened to me.

Strange, but glad I found out about maxblaster to fix it!