reinstalling windows, need help

[dauss]

I just did a low level format of my 40 gig maxtor drive. I think everything is in working order. I want the drive to have NTFS, but the problem is all I have is win98SE and windows xp pro upgrade. Is it possible to change the drive to NTFS, and the boot disk recognizes the HD, and then installed win98SE and then winxp?

[Brainchild]

I believe you will have to install 98,then do the upgrade. It will give you the option to convert to NTFS when it does the upgrade.
It'll work it will just take longer.

[JohnE.]

The Microsoft WinXP Help files state that there is a slight performance hit on drives converted from FAT32 to NTFS rather than formatted as NTFS to begin with.

I'm not sure, but if you install WinXP Upgrade on a freshly formatted NTFS drive/partition wouldn't it just ask you to insert a qualifying product CD (Win98 in this case) and install once such a disk was inserted for verification? I seem to recall doing this when I upgraded to Win2K (running WinXP Pro now).

JohnE.

(doh, just realized you may need (to borrow) a Win2K disk (from someone) for that to work )

[Bob The Great]

actually I think you should be able to install even without 98 installed. It should ask you for your CD, though I don't think my copy of HE Home upgrade even did that.

[dauss]

well I reinstalled win98 and formatted the drive to fat32. I've also finished installing winxp. I have another problem now. I had to drives in it, maxtor 40gb, WD 120gb. OS installed onto maxtor drive. WD driving showing up in the device manager "WDC WD2000JB-75CRA0". Device is working properly. It was working fine for the 1 year+ before I reinstalled win98. I try to populate but it says its 0mb. I can't assign it a drive letter and it doesn't show up under "My computer". I unplug the HD and the computer won't boot at all. It gets stuck at the bios screen and does nothing, even if I try to enter into setup. What do I do?

[Xeroid]

Take a look HERE and see if it helps.

Mike

[originel]

go into settings->control panel->administrative tools->computer management and once you're there go to storage->disk management and in there you can see all the information on your drive. to me it sounds like it isn't formatted.

[Xeroid]

Yeah, what originel said. ^ ^ ^ I'm lazy so I just linked you to the same thing. The link is pretty detailed, pictures and everything.

[dauss]

but it was NTFS. I don't think anything was written to the drive when I reinstalled xp. The maxtor is the master drive(which has the install), the WD is my slave drive for holding stuff. I have like 108 gigs of stuff on that drive that I need. I went into the disk management and it says that it is a foreign drive. What do I do now?

[dauss]

nevermind. I just imported the "foreign" disk which took like 5 seconds, and everything is back to normal