NT Setup disks and the Probelm of Hard drive recognition

Problem: I tried to install Windows NT but the setup disk failed to recognize the hard drive. I have tried the following but nothing worked:

• Do a low level format to the hard drive.
• Delete the hard drive partition and recreate it as FAT16.
• Check the BIOS and the jumper setting of the hard drive.
• Download the latest SCSI driver, skip the scanning for mass storage device and manually install the driver.

Solution: In this case you should try to find the original setup disks.

A complete setup bundle of NT installer includes three setup disks and one CD. If the disks are lost, one can recreate them from the CD by using WINNT in the i386 folder. However, the recreated setup disk requires a hard drive with pre-partitioned space.

On the other hand, the original setup disks do not require a pre-existing partition and could format the hard drive during the setup process. Using the original setup disks could bypass the problem of hard drive recognition.

Another way to get around the problem is to boot the computer with a DOS boot disk which has a CD driver. Then use the NT installer CD directly by typing WINNT /B at the i386 directory.