Windows 2000 and Ms Dos

Ok here's my problem. I have a dell notebook that currently has windows 2000 Professional installed. I am trying to upgrad to windows xp. Unfortunatley you have to have the full install to do this and I bought the upgrade. So my next thought was to format and start over with windows 98 and upgrade from that. Which i do not have a problem with at all. But the problem is there is no option to restart in ms dos mode. So is there a simple way to do this? Unfortunately i bought the laptop off of ebay and it did not come with a cd. Can anyone out there help me?


Pam

 

No, the problem is you need the XP Pro to upgrade if you have Win2k Pro.
Home is considered a downgrade, not an upgrade and will not work as an upgrade.


Option one.
Buy a second hard drive, clean install XP on it, when it asks for proof of meeting the upgrade requirements, pop out the XP install CD and pop in the win98 cd.When it says to , swap the cds back. When finished install the win2k drive (master slave order does not matter here) and do a repair install to correct the boot loader.
(or you can manually edit either boot.ini file since each drive will have one)

Option two is to repartition the drive. When you get to the stage where it asks where to install XP (after you have done the cd swap)Select the drive and press the D key to delete the partition. Then select non partitioned space and press C key to Create a partition and specify the size in megabytes (MB) (not gigabytes) . Repeat for any unused space. When finished here, select the appropriate partition, (C is first listed) and click next to format it and install XP.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp
Nice step by step instructions.
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/clean_install.htm

http://www.blackviper.com/Articles/OS/Multiboot/multiboot1.htm

 

To restart in ms dos mode, if you have a floppy drive, just boot with a win98 startup disk in the drive. If you don't have a floppy drive, you can make or have made a CD that will boot to an a:> prompt. Then partition and format as you like.

 

Note that you cannot format a drive which you are booting to ; so even if you could boot to MSDOS mode, you could not format that drive. You have to boot to another drive, such as a boot floppy or a bootable CDROM which has an os and the necessary tools. In this case, the simplest method is to use the disk management tool on the XP install cd. FDISK and FORMAT from DOS are likely to have major problems with NTFS format drives (often they show as invalid partitions and you bollix the drive when you try to format or repartition them with FDISK and FORMAT). At a minimum you should use the disk manager on the XP cdrom to remove the NTFS partitions. But while you are there, you might as well use it to repartition and format.

 

NOT SO! Fdisk sees the NTFS partition just fine and can modify, delete, and remake it without any problems. Format also doesnt produce any problems, but only produces FAT volumes since it's a DOS program. If you want to create a new NTFS partition, just use the XP or similar installation disk to do the format. However it won't make a FAT partition larger than 32GB, but fdisk WILL.

That whole post is FULL of misinformation!!!

 

It may see it as a 'foreign or unknown' partition rather than being able to ID it as NTFS but yes, it will see the partition and I've never heard of any problems using FDISK to remove the NTFS piece and to format a partition as FAT.

As noted, the XP install CD is a much more efficient way to remove it and reformat if you plan to use NTFS which has lots of advantages over FAT.

 

NOT SO!

NOT SO! See fig on the right.

Re:
Can fdisk see NTFS? See figure on the left.

That's a matter of opinion, not suitable for a pronouncement in view of the experience of the poster.

 

Sorry, the figures didn't come thru. Here they are, I hope. Tried to upload two at once. Actually, problem was they were originally too large. Live and learn, hopefully

 

Fdisk has HD max size limitations

There are evidently several 'versions' of Fdisk floating around and each version seems to have some quirk -- you really need to be careful. Even Microsoft suggests that you might want to consider using a program called Gdisk supplied with Symantec's Ghost program instead of Fdisk if you are using large HD's. You might want to take a look at the links below:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;280737
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263044

Good Luck
Top Dog

 

Sparrow, I was not saying Fdisk cannot do this, only that I have seen many cases where it mishandles it due to the seeing it as invalid or unknown and you wind up with a drive which you need additional tools (gdisk was one that I have used to recover from this) to fix the damage.



But let me get this straight; you are saying you can boot to a drive and format that same drive? Not another partition on the drive, the same one you booted to? I have never seen this done. I have always run partitioning and formatting software from a different drive than the one I want to work on.

The drive limit for win98 Fdisk is 64GB (later versions did not) , Windows XP (pre SP1) had a partition size limit of 137GB, but this is solved in SP1.

 

Funny, I've never had a problem. Experience indicates fdisk and format don't mishandle anything; it's user error.

Yes. Format.com will format any drive(= partition) of reasonable size. To format the drive you've just booted to, however, seems rather silly to me; don't see any legitamate reason you'd even bring it up in this case, since pam120 said the problem is there is no option to restart in ms dos mode, meaning to boot to c!

So? That was not a consideration. The question concerned a dell notebook with Windows 2000.