Installing Windows

[Aidan Bahta]

A person has come to me for help when installing Windows. He FDISKed and formatted correctly, but when he runs the Windows setup program he gets

Setup cannot create files on your setup drive and cannot setup Windows 98,if you have HPFS or NTFS you must create an MS-DOS BOOT PARTITION, if you have LANTASTIC SERVER or SUPERSTOR compession disable it before running setup.

His disk isn't locked or write protected or anything. What should he do next? I am running out of ideas...

Oh yeah - He also gave me this info:

                                       Current Fixed Disk Drive 1
            Partition       Status      Type        Mbyte            Sys
 Usage
               C: 1             A         Pri-Dos     9295           Fat 32
 100%

The Mbyte value looks very suspicious. Should I tell him to run the format command again? Looks like he is out of available space to me...the small size and Usage: 100% looks strange.

Thanks for any help.

[atomicmunky]

i was getting a similar error when trying to help a friend install win2k.

i was getting something like : unable to format disk. disk may be damaged or unformatted.

which is ridiculous because it's a brand new hard drive.
then i was getting similar errors when trying to reisntall win2k on my machine. but then i made the boot disks and started installing from them. the whole process went smoother and the actual formating process went smoother.

i don't know if i just wasted your time by making you read all this but try to format the drive through setup (if possible) rather than running fdisk.

[moospot]

I usually fdisk and then boot from the CD. Setup automatically formats the drive during setup.

[Aidan Bahta]

Originally posted by moospot
I usually fdisk and then boot from the CD. Setup automatically formats the drive during setup.

Isn't that only for non-upgrade CDs?

Originally posted by atomicmunky
but try to format the drive through setup (if possible) rather than running fdisk.

again, isn't that only with the full version?

[Seer]

Not sure if this is recommended or if you should even try it. But when all else fails and i'm starting over, I use fdisk /mbr. While i'm still not certain exactly what it does ( figure it resets the master boot record ) it doesn't show anything happen, but it always seems to do the trick. I got through that error message using this when installing windows and fixing a linux install gone bad.

[Aidan Bahta]

I'll pass the word on, but I am not sure if it will help much. I don't think it is a Master Boot Record problem, that is usually only for getting rid of LiLo or another boot manager. Worth a try though.

I really think it has to do with the drive reporting 100% usage. What could that be from? Would it mean he needs to run the format command again?

[moospot]

Well, If you are formatting the disk, you need the full version of Win98, unless you want to install 95 then 98