installing new hard drive in windows 2000...

Eddie N

Eddie N

10 Inch Member
well..its finally happening..it took me a year but im finally getting my semi dream computer up and running for digital audio/video .. sure ive hit a few snags , but thats what keeps it interesting.. :) ..heres the problem im having now :

i installed a new 20 gig maxtor hard drive on my system...i set it up fine with windows 98 on the first partition , and formatted it FAT32 and everything.. then when i boot up windows 2000 on a different partition on the same computer i get a message saying :

checking file system on f:
the type of the file system is FAT32.

one of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. you may cancel the disk check , but it is strongly recomended that you continue.

now what happens is it begins doing the check , but never advances past 0%.. ive waited for over 10 minutes and it never proceeded past 0%.. the hard drive light is on , but i dont hear any noise coming from the drive... ive tried several times and no dice . it just sits there each time.. although when i skip the hard drive check , windows 2000 recognizes the drive and i can save to it.. but , everytime i boot windows 2000 i get the same nag screen asking me to check for consistency and if i dont hit a key with in 5 seconds it begins..

would the drive being formatted with FAT32 and not NFTS like the O/S is formatted have anything to do with it ?

im lost.. can anyone offer any help ?

- eddie -
 
Hey Eddie, nice that things are sort of up and running now... :D

Hey, try booting right before you go to bed and let it do it's thing. See if when you wake that it is done with dskchk, or whatever is running. 20GB is a lot of info to ckeck out. If it is doing a full check, it could take hours to do.

Ed
 
Windows 2000 can boot off and reside on FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS so that's not the problem. Have you tried to run scandisk or the disk checker within W2k? Maybe checking the disk that way will help. Try Ed's tip to. You never know when your disk decides to take ten hours to run scandisk and you'll never know why...

W2k isn't formatted in any file system. There is just some things that require NTFS.

How is your disk partitioned and what do you have (or intend to have) on the different partitions?

/Ola

BTW - Did you setup W98 on the first partition and then formatted it to FAT32? That might be the problem ;)
 
well..using partition magic i made the hard disk one big logical FAT32 partition .. im just planning on using it for storage for now until my duplicate 10 gig maxtor and promise ide raid controller sometime this week.. then im going to use the slower 20 gig for 0/S and some static storage , and the 2 10 gig in raid 0 formation for audio/video.. so basically im going to need to partition and reformat this drive again anyway , but i just want to know how to handle this problem for future reference..

one thing i forgot to mention.. the drive is set as master on the primary udma66 ide controller on my abit bp6 motherboard.. the drivers are installed , but i was having trouble getting 2000 to boot from the udma66 ide controller when i first tried installing windows2k... what fixed it was just putting the drive on a regular ide controller.. ah damn , just another case of not fixing the problem right the first time coming back to haunt me... :(

im gonna try scandisk though..

- eddie -

ps.. ola ,

windows 98 is on the first 2 gig partition on my 10 gig hard drive formatted to regular FAT.. then windows 2k resides on the last 8 gigs of that drive formatted with NFTS.. this could be the problem ? even though they arent installed on the 20 gig hard drive ? if so i think you found the problem..
 
I think 2k is just needed to take a look at the drive to make sure all is well. It really will take quite a bit of time because it is probably going to look at every damn sector on there. I would let it. If it goes through the routine, you probably will never see dskchk again. Or at least we can hope... :)

Ed
 
Eddie - You have stolen my DAW design down to the last detail! Great, let me know how it works with the dual Celerons and RAID0. I presume that you're using the FastTrak66 raid controller. You're as sick as I am. Also, what Celerons are you using and are you overclocking them?

I just saw that the message you get says "checking file system on drive f:" Which partition am I missing or is F: a ZIP disk or something? Or did you have more partitions at that time?

You might find some answers on the BP6 worship page http://bp6.gamesquad.net/ or more specifically http://bp6.gamesquad.net/win2k_install.phtml

A final tip. The NTFS that W2k uses is not the same as the on NT4.0 uses. Did W2k format your NTFS partition or did you do it using partition magic?

/Ola


[This message has been edited by ola (edited 05-30-2000).]
 
Thanks for that site link Ola. I have the BP6 board too, and that website looks to be a good resource.
 
I don't have the BP6 or the RAID controller yet but I was planning on getting it this summer as I'll be computerless by then. I'm just glad that I have Eddie, and you too, to find all the problems and fixes.

I must say that some of the guys over at bp6.com and also at overclockers.com are really whacky. It's amazing to read about these guys who have bosted some 300MHz processor into the Terraherz realm and all it took was to fill the entire room with liquid nitrogene and wear a space suit while playing quake. Some people spend too much time on wierd projects. Hmm...

/Ola
 
So Windows 2000 CAN understand FAT32? I don't believe Windows NT ever could. But I don't know anything about the improvements for Windows 2000. So maybe that's different (?)
 
W2k is the best (only good?) thing that MS has released so far. FAT32 is just one thing. I recommend it to anyone that wants to use Windows. NT could understand FAT32 with some additional driver/wrapper. I think Slack uses NT with FAT32 with great success.

/Ola
 
ola ,
heres a complete description of my system..

dual celerons 533's
abit bp6 mobo
128 megs ram ( not for long :))
20 gig udma66 5400 rpm maxtor hard drive (o/s and programs)
dual 10 gig 7200 rpm maxtor hard drives connected to the fasttrak66 controller for 20 gigs of raid 0 storage (audio/video)
48x cd-rom
4x4x24 i/o magic cd-r
32 meg tnt2 video card
i/o magic el cheapo pci soundcard
56k modem
floppy drive (duh)

running windows 2000 and windows 98..

the celerons arent overclocked , i tried an easy overclock to 600 mhz but the temp hit 65 degrees celsius with generic fans and heatsinks so i gave up.. if i need the extra processing power i might look into better fans and heatsinks..

i havent yet had time to fix my hard drive problem , but ill keep you informed and thanks for the suggestions...

- eddie -
 
Three questions, one piece of advice.

1. Why W2K? This is a networking designed OS really designed for business. Does it really have any advantage with current Audio/Music
Software?

2. Why dual chips? I am not aware that any of the software currently availabe is designed to access 2 chips or even offload.

3. Why RAID 0 and not 5.

Finally, I thought I read a bulletin somewhere that 98 FAT32 and W2K Fat32 are slightly different. For the life of me I can't remember where. This may be the problem.
 
Some answers:

1. Why do people still believe this? W2k Professional is very much an all-around OS. W2k Server is a business OS but W2k Professional is like NT stability and performance combined with W98 playability. Honestly, it’s great. The only problem is that not all hardware has drivers for it yet. I’ve been running W2k for half a year and none of my computers has crashed due to W2k yet. Knock on wood.

2. It doesn't really matter if the app is written for dual processors or not. Most apps will take advantage of dual processors although the ones specifically designed for dual will take more advantage of it.

3. RAID0 is for speed only and not for reliability. It’s even less reliable than a single disk. RAID5 will be slower than a single disk but (somewhat) assures access to data even at disk failures. Also, you can’t set up only two disks as RAID5.

(4.) FAT32 is FAT32 regardless of W98 or W2k. NTFS differs from NT and W2k. You need NT4.0 with SP4 or later to access disks that are formatted with W2k.

/Ola
 
1 ) because of what ola said , and because windows 98doesnt support dual chips , and i dont like nt..

2 ) vegas pro from sonic foundry supports dual processors , and this is my main program i use for recording.. i aslo do graphics and digital video , and both adobe photoshop 5.5 and adobe premiere take advantage of dual chips..

3 ) dunno.. :)

thanks ola...

- eddie -
 
I think Windows 2000 is still not considered a "home" OS---at least in the home recording arena---because hardware drivers are not as common, as ola says. But if it turns out that the hardware you want *does* have a Windows 2000 driver, then no problem.

There are other reasons, though. Windows 2000 cost more. I don't know how much, but isn't it something like $250 vs. about $89 for Windows 98? I don't want to spend the extra money to get only stability when I don't have any stability problems anyway. I own Cubase VST, and while some people say that they run it fine on Windows NT and 2000, Steinberg claims that they did not write it or test it for NT and they don't guarantee it. In addition, if you like to play games, Windows 2000 is not as capable as Windows 98. I don't have anything against Windows 2000. I've wanted to move to an NT-based Windows for a long time. But for these reasons I have not yet.

Regarding the dual processors, it does in fact matter if an application was written for dual processors. More specifically, it must be written in a mulithreaded manner. If it isn't, it won't run any faster no matter how many processors you have. If a program is designed to execute sequentially, the OS and computer cannot simply run these instructions out of order. It would mess up the sequential logic of the program. But I hadn't realized there was a sequencer app, Vegas Pro, that was designed for dual processors. I'm gonna go take a look.

Jim
 
You're quite right. Not all apps will benefit from dual processors. That's why I wrote "most". I just didn't want to get into the details.

W2k is as capable of hosting games as good as W98 as far as I have seen. Some old games won't run on W2k but I haven't had problems with any game that I wanted to play.

If you haven't had any stability problems with W98, count yourself lucky. To my experience, W98 tends to accumulate problems over time and starts to get unstable and slow after a while.

I beleive Steinberg didn't add NT support for Cubase because the Midi timing problems in NT3.51 was *really* big and kept not supporting NT because of that. It's apparently a lot better in NT4.0 and even better in W2k. Cubase can be installed in NT but you have to be a real pro to do it.

I can see how the larger price tag makes a difference but I couldn't imagine going back to W98 or NT after having used W2k for a while.

Anyway, as someone around here said, whatever floats your boat.

/Ola
 
as i said , windows 2k is the os for me since i use many multithreaded programs.. if i didnt do video , i prolly would have stuck with a single pentium 3..

as far as my original problem goes , i fixed it by simply giving it a quick reformat by right clicking the drive and selecting format from with in windows 2000 .. i formatted it using partition magic the first time , so maybe that had something to do with it.. all is well , thanks for your help :)

- eddie -
 
Ola, Eddie and JimH thanks for the responses.

I still would like to know if there are any throughput or buffering advantages to 2000 over 98. Stability is important but before
adding the overhead of 2000 would like to feel that I am gaining some speed or plug-in handling advantage too. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

The point about doing video is extremely relevant. If I do any simultaneous work in this arena I can defineitely see using 2000.

By the way, I am beta testing Windows Millenium and it seems a little more stable than 98. However, everything will be 2000 engine based in a few years and so going 2000 now is probably best.
 
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