Windows NT set up

Hey

Ok im trying to install windows nt workstation, ive created three floppy disk. I boot from one of the floppy than setup starts.

It askes me to insert the floppy 2 and 3.

Setup attemps to detect mass storage devices on my comp after inserting disk #3. It finds my cdrom than asks me if i want to specify additional drives etc or want to continue without it. I dnt sepecife and continue with setup. And here is my problem, after setup finishs loading device driver i get this msg

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

When the MS-DOS Windows NT setup program, you must specify a temrorary drive that is supported by windows nt.
Setup cannot continue.

note that i wasnt ask to specify any temrorary drive during the setup.

My Hdd is clean and formatted with dos partition using fdisk utility.

any ideas how can i overcome this problem?

thanks in advance

did you format the partition with fat32 (The default for partitions above 2GB), because NT can only access fat16 or NTFS4 partitions...

so do i have to remove the disk and format it with for example partition magic, i formatted it with fdisk (dnt know wht system fil it formats with)

You partition with fdisk but it does not format the partition.
That should not be an issue as the NT installer can format the partition for you BUT I seem to recall an oddity with NT 4.0's installation routine and large hard drives:

Something about the install not being able to format a large drive even though it had/has no problem with huge amounts of drice space otherwise.

I use to break up my drives with a 4 gig os partition (or smaller. I kept my swap on the same partition) and install NT there and then partition/format the rest in Windows using the Disk Administrator gui tool.

It has been a while since I dealt with NT 4.0 so I am a bit hazy on the details- size may be off or something, but I do recall some issue and the partitioning I described avoided the issue.
(Two choices with format: fat16 or NTFS.)

i partitioned my hdd with ntfs, now im getting this msg.

Windows NT requires a hard drive volume with at least 119 megabytes of free disk space. setup will use part of this space for storing temrorary files during installation. The drive must be on a permamently attached local hard disk supported by windows NT, and must not be a compressed drive

setup was unable to locate such a drive with the required amount of free sapce.

ps. My hdd is 1.6 gb

wht do i do now ?
cheers

fdisk /mbr

Do it a couple of times as insurance.
Then go back into fdisk and check the partition size: if it has not changed then you should be good.

[/me scraping rust off of brain cells]

Have you ever had issues with that drive before?

The only other option I can think of is my classic last resort: use a linux partition tool to repart the disk, and then go BACK to fdisk and wip it out and start over.
I do not know why partitioning for a different os and starting over will usually work when nothing else will, but it often does.

If that doesn't do it......too much rust in my braincase I think
I can't recall any other solutions right now...

I always(REPEAT.. ALWAYS) have had trouble installing NT onto larger drives, despite breaking them up into the proper size partition. NT does not like very large partitions. Eventually, I got into the habit of using no larger than 1.2gb hard drives as a boot drive. This, in most cases, solved the problem. For ease of setup, use the barest minimum of components, and add in your gear after. NT install difficulty is almost always hardware related.

The following MS TechNet documentation may also be of some help to you...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/ntwrkstn/Default.asp

The "Windows NT Workstation" branch is expanded using the above link...here you can expand "Product Documentation" | NT Workstation 4.0 Start Here Manual". Here you have access to everything from "Learning The Basics"/"Beginning Installation" to "Windows NT Setup Troubleshooting".