Windows NT 4.0 Fails to Find Hard Disk on Reinstall

Windows Tips & Secrets
1998 PLATINUM technology, Inc.

Reprinted with permission from Platinum Technology, Inc.

Installation of NT 4.0 is normally a smooth process, (if you follow our suggestions). Occasionally, IS professionals come across an error during installation that says the Hard Drive could not be located. There is no way around this error and it comes up every time you retry the install. Some people suspect there is something wrong with the diskettes they made at install, because when they use the original diskettes, everything works fine. Head scratching time.

The error comes up right after the hardware detection phase, just before the system files copy to the hard drive. Skipping hardware detection or selecting the devices yourself does not help. Here's what the error says:

Setup is unable to locate the hard drive partition prepared by the MS-DOS portion of Setup.

When you run the MS-DOS Windows NT Setup program, you must specify a temporary drive that is supported by Windows NT. See your System Guide for more information.

The first time this message comes up, you whack yourself in the head and say, "I forgot to specify the temporary drive. Well, I won't forget this time." You start all over from scratch, but nowhere can you find a place in the Setup process to specify a temporary drive, or anything else that the message leads you to believe. Now most people would become frustrated. The rest of us kick our chairs and try to embed the Setup diskettes in the wall like throwing stars (two of three is the current record).

Collect your thoughts and grab the original set of diskettes (locked up in a vault somewhere), and run WINNT with those. This time everything works fine. What's the difference?

The answer turns out to be one tiny file on Disk 2. The file is WINNT.SIF, a setup information file (SIF) that contains all the information about the location of the temporary files copied to the hard drive during installation. The information in the file comes from previous installations. It is created when you make the three setup disks using the WINNT /O command. This creates disks with the WINNT.SIF file on Disk 2.

What's that you say? You never use that switch. You've attended all our seminars, you read our material and you know to use the WINNT /OX switch to create those disks. Well, it so happens that when you create the setup disks during an actual installation, the Setup process creates the disks the same as if you'd used the WINNT /O switch.

Create the diskettes with the /OX switch, use the original diskettes, or delete the WINNT.SIF file from Disk 2, and restart the process. You could also edit the WINNT.SIF file and change the value of MsDosInitiated from 1(True) to O (False). The value can be found under the [Data] label, and, in fact, it is the only value in the entire file. No error this time. Problem solved. Now, get out your pocketknife and start digging those diskettes out of the sheetrock.

For More Information

For more information, go to the Platinum Technology, Inc. web site at:
https://www.platinumtechnology.com.

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