This is a very timely thread for me as I am currently in the process of installing Win 2000 into my rig for stock trading. I am currently using Win98SE and I am running out of resources all the time. I have a Matrox Marvel G450 dual head in my AGP slot and a G450 PCI in a PCI slot on my ASUS P3v4x mobo. I said "in the process of" because I have been at it for 5 days and I cannot get it to install all the way. I have hit about 10 different errors and they each tell you to do 4 or 5 things to the BIOS or Virus software or other programs. No reccomendation seems to work for me. I am trying to install Win 2000 on a brand new Maxtor Diamond Plus 60, 40 gig hard drive. Now supposedly Windows 2000 will not accept such a large drive and will not install itself on it unless you partition the drive smaller which I have done, or use the NTFS file system, or use third party software to partition the drive. I want to use FAT 32 since I want to share some files with my current Win 98 SE. I am installing Win 2000 as a dual boot system. I read that you should not use the fdisk and format utility that comes with Windows 2000. You should use the DOS version of fdisk and format instead. But neither work in my case. I even tried to format and partition my drive with Partition Magic, but Windows 2000 refused to install on it. I have changed all my BIOS settings to default, I have disabled all my cache setting and disabled all shadowing. I am running with the latest BIOS version and have run two anti virus applications before I started. I have also done about a dozen more things as suggested by Microsoft but my part of this thread is getting too long. Basically I cannot go beyond the text portion of the Win 2000 installation. It took me 2.5 weeks of work to install Win 98SE on my rig so I am not doing too badly yet. I finally had to trick it by installing Win 98SE on the correct hard drive in another computer than switch it to my current rig and it reloaded all the drivers and it worked just fine. I cannot do this with Win 2000 as none of my other computers have ACPI as they are all older. Win 2000 must have that to install. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.
Win2k upgarade is best approached very slowly. Firstly, contact your OEM of your machine/laptop and tell them what you plan to do, and they can provide you with a best approach basis. Invariably, they will tell you that you must upgrade the Bios, and provide the latest version. For safety sakes, go purchase (presuming you have a USB port) or utilize your CD-RW and burn CDR's with your data as a backup source. Don't forget to purchase the more expensive CDRW's not the CDR's. Upgrade your BIOS, but before doing that, get from your OEM other DLL's and Device Drivers that your configuration will need specifically for Win2k. Opposite to this is to spend hours browsing the websites of the Mfgr's of the components on your machine/laptop. See what they say regarding Win2k compliance. Alternatively, during the process of upgrade (presuming you bought the FULL version, not the upgrade) it will inspect your machine and tell you what needs to be deleted, what needs to be upgraded (read previous notes), what will work spartanly. At that point get out a fresh pencil and start writing the history of your machine in every detail, just as it shows in the upgrade box. Do Not Proceed until you've gotten those upgrade patches (perhaps from off another machine). At this point, you've probably made the worst mistakes possible, and will need a friend to use their machine so you can surf and get these datapoints and correct your configuration. Last, absolute last resort is to do as the other guy said and format new. Guess what, you're still going to deadend at the aforementioned points. Do the math...
I had major problems with Matrox card. I installed it and it worked but computer was extremely slow with both monitors, and the mouse was very slow, so it was not good, I returned the card, and I'm in the process of ordering a colorgraphics card, which costs 4 times as much, but I'm sure it will be well worth it.
limitdown Thanks for the reply. I did most of what you recommended. I just read your thread tonight as I my rig was totally down when I lost my WIN98SE system trying to install W2k, so I am just catching up with the messages on this forum. After two weeks of trying it turns out that my problem was too much RAM. I kept getting errors and that prevented me from completing the installation. I got just about every error that Microsoft could throw at me. I went to the Maxtor site, the maker of my three hard drives and they had a workaround for installing Win2k on a Maxtor drive. Well the workaround was shoddly written and Drive C: became Drive D: somehow and vice versa and therefore I lost my whole system. I formated my three drives and started to install Win 2k on my fastest 40 gig drive and I still could not install all the way because of these errors, but I finally got to the middle of phase three instead of just the end of phase two in the installation. I finally saw a bunch of errors that had to do with memory dump. So I took a wild stab and opened up my computer and took 640 megs of RAM out leaving 128. Win2k installed all the way without a single error. Now as to the G450 mentioned by others on this thread. I have a G450 Marvel dualhead in my AGP slot and a G450 dualhead PCI in a PCI slot. The G450 PCI behaved differently under Windows 98SE than under Win2k. First of all Matrox is still rapidly improving their drivers for these cards. I bought it as soon as it came out a couple of months ago and Matrox already had a new driver out for it. The card in the Win98SE system allowed two monitors to be plugged in and expanded your desktop in any arrangement you wanted. Under Win 2k it only recongnizes one monitor and stretches your desktop to a side by side or top to bottom fashion. You cannot split up the two monitors and place them on each side of a center one for instance. It will not even allow you to install the second monitor drivers as it does not even find it or see it. However, both the G450 card work better in Win 2k than 98SE. The Win2k drivers are better and allow you more options in the setup. Unless you do this for a living though the cards are a bear to setup. It is not a 2 min job, more like a 2 day job, but I must say the Win2k setup was easier to work with and understand. The instructions and the software for setup seem to be a work in progress for Matrox, not very user friendly. If I can answer any questions, I would be glad to. Thanks.
I'm going to install Win2000 on my desktop computer. It has 2 drives, C: and D:. I plan to back up all my files on D: and then reformat C: and fresh install W2K on C:. Will I be able to get the files or see D: which will be in Win98 format from the new C: with W2K?
In your case probably FAT 32. NTFS will read FAT 32 files, but FAT32 cannot read NTFS files. Are you keeping Win98 SE on your Drive D: also or just the files? If so you could set it up as a dual boot system. In that case you definitely would want FAT 32 file system for both drives.
Wirehead, D:drive will be a original Win 98, but I don't think I'll have it bootable. I think once I get win2k formatted on C: and can access the files on D:, I'll probably then transfer everything over and then format D: as a W2K formatted file. If this is the case should I just format C: now as a NTSF drive, is that superior format and going forward?