Insuficient Memory to istall windows?

[tony draper]

Been pottering about with hard disks the last couple of nights,got a old 40 gig hard disk from a different puter so decided to rig that as a spare,clean operating system,drivers ect,anyway formated the disk using the XP disk manager formated ok reports itself as 40 gig stuck the win98 disk in and it formatted it again for some reason, not fat32 file system?
Now I only have windows XP Pro upgrade disk,so I have to load windows 98 SE on the disk first then upgrade to win XP,did this with another disk no probs last night and on numerous other occasions tried with this newly formatted disk,it starts to load ie windows files ect, then report unable to load windows,insuficient memory? what does this mean? I have 2 gig of ram in the machine, it says something about removing memory resident progs?
Any help here appreciated.:confused:
Been hitting this forum hard last few days.:E

[tony draper]

Further information re this reluctant hard disk,looking at the contents from the command line it shows a COMMAND COM file dated 1999? How does one go about deleting this using the command line,long time since I dabbled in Dos.
The disk is from a HP Pavilion machine and it had a section of the hard disk labeled RESCUE? I assumed this would disappear along with the rest of the stuff on said HD when I formated it.
Puzzled of Gateshead.
:confused:

[bnt]

Am I right in saying that you are starting the upgrade from Win98 to XP from inside Win98? If so, IIRC, Win98 can't actually see or use all 2GB you have installed anyway, so the fact that 2GB is installed is not relevant.

This is really stretching my memory, but I suggest you run "msconfig" and un-check items in autoexec.bat, config.sys and win.ini (or edit those files manually, keeping backups), so that fewer things load, after which you have to restart Win98. Target anything you recognise as "extras" - if you don't know what it is, leave it alone, or Windows might not start, and require Safe Mode (F5) at boot to fix.

Do not go deleting files like command.com - the process should not require you to do anything like that. command.com on Win98 is the program that provides the command line, so deleting it from the command line is like sitting on a branch of a tree and sawing it off! :eek:

[tony draper]

It's ok folks gorrit sussed, the disk had two partitions,one partition 3 gig had the HP recovery on it I removed the partition when I fdiske it and created a new partition it made the 3gig bit the primary.
err negative BNT,I install XP by putting the newly formated disk with win 98SE on it in the machine as master and boot the from the upgrade disk,and it does its ugrade bit,done it many times now no probs.
Thanks anyway,if I have anymore probs one shall return.
:)

[Saab Dastard]

Tony, are you sure you have to actually install the Windows 98 first?

I'm sure I recall doing a clean install of XP on a friend's PC with an upgrade copy of XP - it prompted me to insert the qualifying installation media (in this case, Win ME).

Otherwise, it sounds more like you are hitting a problem with the Win 98 install - it's as if the installation boot process isn't seeing anything above 640K RAM.

Are you able to boot off the Win 98 CD? I suggest that you remove all partitions from the disk, then boot and run the Win 98 install from the CD.

SD

[tony draper]

Nope no problem with doing it my way,done it dozens of times,the XP Upgrade disk I have is not bootable ie it will not autorun,it has to have a operating system installed on the disk to be upgraded ie win98SE,frinstance it will not upgrade earlier versions of windows,only from SE,it was a disk used by schools to upgrade their puter systems it is not a standard XP instalation disk.
Question,why does formating a disk from the disk management system in XP only give the option of the NTFS file system?it does not offer the option of formating FAT32,? I have nothing philosophically agin NTFS just I have never used it before,does it make any difference?
:confused:

[Saab Dastard]

Tony, you definitely can format volumes with FAT32 in XP Disk Manager. See MS KB article here. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310525)

SD

[Bushfiva]

SD, XP won't offer the FAT32 format option on a partition larger than 32GB, although it will read/write existing FAT32 partitions.

To format large FAT32 drives, you have to do it using a third-party tool such as EASEUS; there are many others.