Fresh Installation - Step-By-Step

Creating Your First Partition

Now that you have a clean hard drive and a battle plan, it's time to get to work. First you need to use Partition Magic to create the necessary partitions on your blank hard drive.

1. Boot to a DOS prompt using either the MS-DOS 6.22 Boot Disk or the Windows 98 Boot Disk as explained before.

2. When you're at the A:\> prompt, type FDISK /MBR and press Enter.

   This will reset the Master Boot Record (MBR) in case there are any remnants from previous multi-boot installations. But run this command only when starting from scratch, don't use it on a machine with an existing multi-boot environment that you wish to keep, it would destroy any customizations of the MBR and break the multi-boot.

3. Now remove the boot disk and insert the Partition Magic 5.01 (PM5) floppy disk, then type pqmagic and press Enter.

   When the main screen appears, your hard drive should be displayed as one solid block of unallocated space.

   Note: If you have only one physical hard drive in your machine, it will already be selected. If you have more than one drive, you need to make sure that the first drive is selected (which it normally is by default) by selecting it from the Disk drop-down list in the top left corner.

4. First create the DOS partition, by right-clicking anywhere in the gray unallocated space and select Create.

5. In the dialog box that displays, select Create as: Primary Partition, Partition Type: FAT, Label: MSDOS, and Size: 1950 MB, then click OK.

6. In order to make this partition bootable, right-click on the new partition, select Advanced and click Set Active.

7. Click the Apply button to actually perform the operation. You just created your first partition.

8. When the operation is complete, click Exit to leave the program.

9. Before you click OK to restart your machine, insert MS-DOS 6.22 Setup Disk 1.

10. Click OK to reboot and start installing MS-DOS.

    The MS-DOS installation begins.

Installing MS-DOS

The DOS installation starts automatically after you reboot your machine with the DOS Setup Disk 1 inserted.

1. Follow the instructions on the screen; they are pretty self-explanatory, and usually all the default options work just fine.

2. Insert disks 2 and 3 as prompted.

3. When the installation is finished you will be prompted to remove all disks and press Enter to reboot the machine in MS-DOS mode.

   Again a pretty easy process. The machine will reboot displaying a C:> prompt.

Creating The NT Partition

The machine should be rebooted now and sitting at a C:> prompt.

1. Remove the boot disk and insert the Partition Magic 5 disk (again) and type a:pqmagic to start PM5.

   When the main screen appears, you'll see your DOS partition on the left, followed by the remainder of the drive as unallocated space.

2. Right-click in the unallocated space and select Create.

3. In the dialog box that displays, select Create as: Primary Partition, Partition Type: NTFS, Label: NT4, and Size: 2500 MB, then click OK.

4. In order to make this partition bootable, right-click on the new partition, select Advanced and click Set Active.

5. Now click the Apply button to actually perform the operation.

   You just created your NT partition.

6. When the operation is complete, click Exit to leave the program.

7. Before you click OK to restart your machine, insert NT 4 Setup Disk 1.

8. Now click OK to reboot and start installing NT 4.

Installing NT 4

The NT installation will start automatically when you reboot your machine with the NT 4 Setup Disk 1 inserted.

Note: The general installation process for NT 4 Workstation and Server is almost identical. The following instructions apply to both installation processes.

1. Follow the instructions in the NT 4 installation program.

2. When the setup program asks you where to install NT, it will show a table of existing partitions.

   If you followed the instructions so far, you should see first a partition labeled Unknown, which is your DOS partition. The second partition should be labeled NTFS (the file system you chose for it) and NT4 (the label you gave it).

3. Use the arrow keys to select and highlight the NT4 partition and press Enter to install NT into that partition.

4. On the next screen, select the Format the partition using the NTFS file system option.

   NT 4 will do a fresh format of the partition and set up a nice clean NTFS file system.

5. Continue to follow the instructions on the screen.

   Eventually the setup program will ask you to remove any floppy and press Enter to restart. Setup will reboot your machine and continue with a graphical interface.

6. Reboot your machine as prompted.

   Setup asks you to let it reboot one more time after which you should end up at a regular login screen.

7. Log in and take a few more minutes to complete and customize your NT installation.

8. First, install your NT service pack of choice

   Warning! NT 4 SP 3 or earlier and Win2K CANNOT co-exist on the same system - period! The dangerous caveat with NT 4 and Win2K is that even though the file system they both use is NTFS, Win2K uses a newer version of NTFS (NTFS 5) that cannot be read by NT 4 SP 3 (Service Pack 3) or earlier (NTFS 4 only). If you install NT 4 with SP 3 or earlier on a machine that also has Win2K on it, the moment you start Win2K it will change the NTFS file system on the NT 4 partition and update it to NTFS 5. The next time you try to boot to NT 4 you'll end up with a nasty BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) with lots of gobbledygook and the message INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE. The simple reason is that only SP 4 and higher can "understand" WIN 2K's NTFS 5. There is no way to fix this once this happens! Therefore you always need to install SP 4 or higher on NT 4 if you plan to make it coexist with Win2K on the same machine! Even hiding the NT 4 partition from the Win2K partition with Partition Magic and/or System Commander won't work, so don't even think about it. NT 4 SP 3 or earlier and Win2K cannot co-exist on the same system - period!

   Tip: To execute an unattended service pack installation, go to Start / Run, type the path to the service pack followed by -u for unattended and click OK. The installation will complete automatically without prompting you for anything, including the reboot. For example, D:\NTServicePacks\NT4_SP6\sp6_128.exe -u.

9. If necessary, reboot when prompted.

10. After the reboot, install the video driver if needed.

    Tip: To find out what video card is in your computer, go to Start / Run, type Command and click OK. In the window that displays, type debug at the prompt and press Enter. At the dash prompt, type dc000:35 and press Enter. Look at the rightmost column. There is a lot of gobbledygook, but somewhere in there you'll see a worded description for your video card. For example, if it shows G200, you probably have a Matrox Millennium G200. If it shows nVIDIA TNT, chances are you have a card with the nVIDIA Riva TNT chip set and need to install the Detonator drivers. Type q and press Enter to exit the debug utility.

11. After installing the correct driver and the mandatory reboot, go to Start / Settings / Control Panel / Display / Settings and select the color, resolution and refresh rate you want.

12. After making your selection click the Test button to see if your display can handle it.

13. If you see the test pattern, wait until it returns to the regular screen, answer Yes to the prompt, then click Apply to make the actual change.

    If you selected invalid settings and your screen becomes garbled after pressing the Test button, just wait 5 seconds until the screen automatically returns to its previous stage.