Robbie Mosaic's Web Log

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2001-11-9

Today, I installed Windows 2000 Professional English version on my computer. For several times, I have been failed to install Windows 2000. See the details below:

The first time I install Windows 2000, I formatted the first partition on my 40GB Maxtor HDD. The partition was originally NTFS, and is with a Windows NT 4 installed on it. I used PQMagic 5 to format the partition. But as PQMagic starts, it told me there was something wrong with the "CHS value". I don’t exactly know what it was. I guess that the information was stored on the HDD. I don’t think it is something stored in CMOS because I let the BIOS SETUP program detect the HDD again and found no change in the parameters. PQMagic asked me to correct that error, and I agreed. Then, Windows 2000 setup started from MS-DOS (attached to Windows Me). I thought at first the setup program of Windows 2000 may not correctly find drive C because at the command prompt of MS-DOS, C: refers to the the first partition in the extended partition (the extended partition was referenced by the third item in the main partition table), whose label was MS-DOS. After the first portion of installation, the start up part of Windows 2000 prompted that NTLDR (Windows NT loader) was missing. That was a great failure. I guessed the reason was that the setup program started in MS-DOS while C: was NTFS. Then, I used PQMagic to format C: to FAT32 and then ran setup again. In the end, Windows 2000 Setup told me "unable to create boot section in C:", and told me to make sure whether there is a boot virus. I don’t think that there is any virus. I tried more, but still failed. It always told me "drive C: is corrupted".

Several weeks later, I tried to install Windows NT 4 on that partition. I formatted the partition to FAT, and tried the installation. The first portion of  installation was successful, but after the computer restarted, Windows NT left a long pause at "Windows NT 4.06 build 1381 Service Pack 1", and in the end showed up a blue screen "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE". Really too strange.

A week ago, when I was in the university, trying to recover Wu Li’s computer using tools, I also found the same problem forbidding me to install Windows 2000 on his computer. Wang Leiqing (wlqing) told me that there is a way to solve this problem. The way was widely used by the computer users on their floor (3rd floor in our dormitory building). The way was:

START COMPUTER USING WINDOWS 2000 CD-ROM AND RUN THE SETUP PROGRAM AFTERWARDS.

Yao Junyong told me he found another slower way: Install it from MS-DOS without running the disk cache program SMARTDRV.

Today, I tried the way told to me by Wang Leiqing and successfully had it installed on my computer.

Strange thing today: The CD-ROM had been flashing wildly even though there is no disc in it. At first, every time I opened "My Computer" it happened. After a reboot, the symptom seemed to have disappearred. But exactly, after the installation of Windows MediaPlayer 8, the symptom appearred again. In the end, I disabled the CD-ROM. Also, I found that if the CD-ROM is enabled, Windows Media Player 8 will play MP3s in a wrong sampling frequency: It should be 22050Hz, but the player chose 11025Hz since the second item in the playlist.

>The CDROM drive is not working properly even if SP3 is installed
Today, 2002-10-26, I installed Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, but the CDROM drive is still not working properly. It must be a problem of Microsoft’s device driver.

>The "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE" error comes from the partitions that end over the first 8GB of the HDD. This should be solved using the Windows NT 4.0 SP4 ATAPI driver. After applying SP4, NTFS 5 partition can also be accessed.

>The "Drive C is corrupted" error message is a problem of the Windows Me startup disk. Use Windows 98 startup disk when installing Windows 2000 from DOS to avoid this error.