needing to pick your brains.....

[WarPiper]

...ok, I know that this is a amiga site, ok ok, but for some reason I dont seem to trust any other bunch of egg heads that are out on the net, this is a Microsloft question about Winblows 2000 pro. so please dont flame, if you dont know the answer I understand.

I have a IEEE1394 firewire card and an  external 200 GB hard drive, I need to install windows 2000 pro on the external drive but for some reason, windows says that it is unable to do so.

what is the best way of going about installing w2k on a firewire drive with a system running windblows 98se.

 :-?  :-?  :-?  :-?  :huh:

[WarPiper]

what no takers?

oh well, and here I thought that alot of you amiga users who do nothing but put windows down all the time actually knew your sh!t.

maybe not

[roger_ramjet]

u probably need to get a driver for the firewire hardrive and when u install windoze it might say press (whatever keys) to enter a driver disk.

cant really remember windows98se havnt used for a long time ;-)

[DethKnight]

First guess, I'd say you're bios needs to be "bleedin-edge" recent, in hopes it will assign a "Drive-letter" to the firewire/drive
port, without waiting for windows to do it. (sounds like a pipedream)

Or my mind has me contemplating "what-if" scenarios involving Linux/VMware.............

[N7VQM]

WarPiper wrote:

what is the best way of going about installing w2k on a firewire drive with a system running windblows 98se.

Does Win98 see the drive after the driver is installed?  
Can you format the beast as FAT32?
 Another possibilty is your BIOS can't support such a large disk.  My PC is only a year or so old and it doesn't support anything larger than 132GB.   Also, I don't think that drive will be bootable without fireware drive support in BIOS.  What is your motherboard make and model?

[Ilwrath]

Personally, I think roger_ramjet is onto something...

u probably need to get a driver for the firewire hardrive and when u install windoze it might say press (whatever keys) to enter a driver disk.

This is exactly how you set a SCSI disk or array as a WindowsNT (or 2000/XP)-bootable device and install to it.  I would imagine a firewire drive would behave similar.  

My personal opinion is that booting from a firewire device sounds like data corruption waiting to happen, though.  Just as booting from an array isn't always a great idea, booting from a firewire device may get a bit messy...  especially in error-recovery.  

[WarPiper]

ok

1) the computer is ancient (think about 3 to 4 years, no bios updates, Gateway crap)

2) windoze 98se does detect the drive as a removable drive, but there is no way of making partitions, but does act like I can make one giant partition the whole 200 Gigs

3) Fdisk does not recognize the drive when displaying partition information

4) the drive is a Maxtor diamondmax 200 Gb Ultra ata133 IDE hard drive installed in a external firewire box (made to do so), when loading from win2kpro boot floppies, win2k setup would partition it, but not install the OS, I am tring to make 8 partitions at 25 Gb each for use as either storage only or to also nclude a OS for use as a dual boot.

[DickFitswell]

First off, why are you using windows 98?, and on FLOPPIES at that?, windows may not recognize the firewire drive under DOS.

Second, win98 wont recognize a hard drive that big, not even if its partitioned.

Third, Why in the lords good name would you make 8 25 gig partitions? It will not speed up your access times,(assuming thats a reason youd do this). are you going to install 8 OS's?

Fourth, was there no room for an internal IDE drive?

Fifth, Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade. If you have the money to buy a Firewire drive, geez a 200 gig model would be quite pricey at that also...hmm.. You could have updated the WHOLE computer for that money. Id say retail would be about 250 bucks, for that money you could have gotten a an Athlon 2500 Barton, motherboard and memory....oh well, good luck.

Must be nice to spend without thinking..lol, wish i could.

[Waccoon]

In my experience, Windows really doesn't like being on any external drives, even if they are recognized by the BIOS.  Removable drives also don't show up in FDisk, which is why I've never gotten Win95 to boot from a ZIP disk, even with virtual mem disabled.

Whenever I try to install Windows on a non-IDE or SCSI drive, it crashes with a BSOD and tells me it is a non-accessable boot device.  Windows does the same thing (in safe mode) if you swap motherboards, or if you're trying to boot off a 3rd party IDE controller (regardless of whether it's a hard drive or CD-Rom).

It might be possible, but I think you're in for a nightmare.  Besides, putting Windows on an external drive might seem like a form of piracy or illegal copying to Windows, so the OS may not want to work at all.  I'm just speculating, but it seems entirely possible given how many BSOD's I get when mucking around with my drives.  Win98 certainly didn't give me as many problems.   :-?

Oh, and if you do anything at all with Win2K, I'd recommend partitioning with FAT32.  NTFS has security desciptors which might also prevent the system from booting from non-IDE or SCSI drives.  Again, I'm just guessing.  NTFS is an all-around pain in the butt!

[plexus]

What is Windows???
What is Microsoft???
And what a hell is PC kind of crap???

[bloodline]

WarPiper wrote:
ok

1) the computer is ancient (think about 3 to 4 years, no bios updates, Gateway crap)

2) windoze 98se does detect the drive as a removable drive, but there is no way of making partitions, but does act like I can make one giant partition the whole 200 Gigs

3) Fdisk does not recognize the drive when displaying partition information

4) the drive is a Maxtor diamondmax 200 Gb Ultra ata133 IDE hard drive installed in a external firewire box (made to do so), when loading from win2kpro boot floppies, win2k setup would partition it, but not install the OS, I am tring to make 8 partitions at 25 Gb each for use as either storage only or to also nclude a OS for use as a dual boot.

Firstly you would need a Very modern BIOS that can boot from the Firewire... it might be an I dea to see if DOS will install on it. You shouldn't need Fdisk, as you can format the thing in Windows.

I think if the drive is assigned to C: win2k should install. Unplug any other hard drive so that the firewire gets the first large Drive letter (C:). Use the Win2k boot floppies to install.

That's how I would do it...

or if that didn't work, simply install Win2k with the drive attached to the IDE and then put it in the Firewire box.

[lempkee]

very nice topic , laughable....

pc's need drivers for new disks even if they are 2 years old....even for IDE drives u need a new bios incase u need a bigger disk etc...

ohwell nice place to put such a post as then we all know we are on the correct setups

have fun with yer machine...i doubt it will be ..

[mikeymike]

@ lempkee

Ok, I've heard worse in the department of sweeping generalisations, but on top of that, your information is antiquitated.

@ whoever is having the problem (can't remember)

post error messages you get, exactly what you've tried so far, then I might be able to help.

[mikeymike]

Someone has already said, but booting from a firewire device would require BIOS support, and then the device would likely have to be integrated into the motherboard, or a definite standard set up (which I'm not aware of one, but then I don't know much about firewire).

To get Win2k to install onto a firewire storage device, it would have to have specific drivers to support the firewire card and storage device that are specifically designed for setup mode (to confirm this, there should be a 'txtsetup.oem' file in the driver packs).  AFAIK, but not sure, but I think Windows firewire support isn't 100%.  It doesn't support everything conceivable.  What I mean by that is, it doesn't support certain concepts, like say booting off a firewire device, or for wild example, a firewire camera.  Drivers can obviously fix it not natively supporting a certain device, but it needs to support the basic method.  For example, for NT4 to support AGP devices, one needs to install Service Pack 3 or above first, otherwise you're totally out of luck.  No driver would fix that (unless it was a horrible hack).

Try http://support.microsoft.com/ searches.

People keep talking about Win98 in this thread, I'm not sure why, I kind of ignored the rest of their post :-) But Win98 is very unlikely to support your plan.  Win2k is unlikely to IMO as well, but less unlikely than 98, as 98 has been forsaken by MS and the only people likely to support it are the hardware manufacturers.

[B00tDisk]

Ahem.  Believe it or not, when I was very poor and couldn't afford computer equipment  I used to run '95 partially on an internal 170mb HD and on an external SCSI ZIP drive.  Wasn't the worst thing in the world.  Took quite a bit of hacking to do.

Anyway, to answer your question, the easiest way to do what you're trying to do is this:

Remove the drive from the case, install it locally on the IDE bus inthe system, install Win2k.

Copy your boot.ini onto a boot floppy with a set of "minimal" firewire drivers, redirect your boot.ini path to whatever the RDISK volume for your now externalized firewire drive is.

Should work.