Hi Folks.

Brian Kraut wrote:
>
>
> I have been trying for a week on a 13G Maxtor and a 15G Western Digital
> drive to set them up as 95/NT dual boot machines.  When I do it on a
> 3.5G drive everthing works fine.

I have done this a month ago with my new 20 GB disk. It took me two
weeks (!)
to find out how, but now it works! There are some very nasty limitations
of the NT installing and boot process.

I ended up with this configuration:

- No extra boot managers (like BootMagic) or drive managers like
EZ-Drive

- Boot from a small primary FAT16 paritition (C:) where the NT
boot-manager
  can reside. My is 100 MB, less will work also. It must be at the
  beginning of the hard disk and be inside the first 256 cylinders (!)

- Second paritition ( D: , first logical drive in the extendet
paritition)
  1 GB FAT16 (FAT 32 should work also) for Win9x

- Third paritition (E:, second logical drive) : 2 GB NTFS for NT (FAT 16
  should work also)

- Rest - one big NTFS or FAT32 paritition or what ever you like ...

  There is a driver aviable  enabling Windows NT acsess
  FAT32 filesystems. The read-only version of it is free. So if you
  like to acsess the big data paritition from both Win9x and NT, choose
  FAT32. If you want to prevent Win9x from acsessing it, use NTFS.

- To do all this right, be sure your BIOS recognizes the big hard disk
  correctly. If not, try to update the BIOS. Be sure to remove all
  bootmanagers and harddisk managers like EZ-Drive. First install
  Win9x, then NT.


This is the short form of my recomendation.  Here are some more
explanations. There are several limitations of Windows NT.

- The Install procedure uses old ATAPI/IDE drivers and can not
  recogize big hard disk properly. On a running system the problem
  is solved with the Service Packs, they are not aviable at install
  time ...

- The install procedure first formats FAT16 and copies the files on
  it and then converts it to NTFS. So the NT install paritition
  has all limitations of FAT16.

There are some more or less complicated work-arounds for this
problems described at http://www.ntfaq.com/

There is one more problem, not mentioned there. The NT boot loader
has a bug causing a divide by 0 error for big hard disks. If the
hard disk have more then 128 heads, the (primary) boot paritition
have to be inside the first 512 cylinders. A hard disk with 256
heads the boot paritition have to reside inside the first 256
cylinders.




Hope, all this helps you...

Stefan.