Conference akocoa::decpc_portables

2290.0. "Reinstall NT from CD on HiNote Ultra II?" by HSOSS1::HARDMAN (It's a girl! Now what?) Tue Jan 28 1997 09:58

    So I get this nifty HiNote Ultra II, with NT 4.0 preinstalled. Hmmm,
    pretty nice! But now, a few days later, the system hung and had to be
    powered down, rather than performing a normal shutdown sequence. When
    powered back on, CHKDSK started automatically and found a few problems
    and said it "fixed" them, then the system rebooted again.
    
    The system did indeed reboot to the NT 4.0 splash screen and the "Press
    Ctrl-alt-del to logon" box appeared. However, when I do that, the logon
    screen has no line for the domain entry. Attempting to logon with any
    known user/password combination results in the "Attempting to logon"
    box coming up for 3 minutes or so, then the errror "Could not logon to
    the system. Netlogon service is not running". Hmmm, this is not good.
    
    No problem, I'll just reinstall NT. Uh-oh, big problem. I install the
    floppy dock so that I can boot the NT install disks. However, that
    process aborts when the CD cannot be found. But if I install the CD
    (part of the Mobile Media Module), then there's no floppy drive to boot
    from.
    
    Is there any way to reinstall NT 4.0 onto this system? It ships with
    install floppies and the NT 4.0 CD, but I haven't found anything in the
    documentation that shipped with the system that explains how to perform
    this small bit of magic.
    
    My customer is interested in buying LOTS of these systems. But I need
    to understand how we can support them for the next 3 years (the life of
    the support contract). Can someone help me out here? Is there a magic
    incantation that can be performed to reinstall NT 4.0 onto one of
    these? 
    
    The only solution that I can think of is to repartition the hard drive,
    format it back to FAT (It's NTFS right now), then use a boot floppy to
    connect to a server that has the NT kit on it and reinstall everything
    from there. This, obviously, is not a very elegant solution, as it
    means that all data on the hard drive will be gone forever. Is there a
    better way?
    
    Thanks,
    
    Harry
    

    Hi,
    
    So the local Administrator account won't work?
    
    WHat I would try first is to create a DOS boot disk that has the 
    DOSCDROM.SYS and MSCDEX.EXE
    files that allow you to read the CD and do a floppyless re-install.
    
    -----
    
    After installing NT40 on an UltraII that came with Win95, and then
    reinstalling it a couple of times after that (hint: do not install
    SP2!) I have the following arrangement:
    
    Boot partition:  200MB DOS FAT, with DOS CDROM drivers
    NTFS partition: 1.1GB NT 4.0 System 
    
    Now when NT loses the plot, I can boot to DOS,  and carry out whatever
    repairs are needed from there. 
    
    ---
    

    No, the local administrator account doesn't work. None of the accounts
    that were created on this system work. I have downloaded a file called
    NTFSDOS, which lets me at least boot to DOS, then see the files on the
    NTFS hard drive. I guess I'll have to get the system booted to the network,
    then copy the files that I need to keep to a server, using NTFSDOS.
    Then I can rebuild it from the ground up. :-(
    
    As for creating the boot floppy, I can't boot from that DOS boot floppy
    *and* have the CD installed at the same time. The CD-ROM driver will
    fail to configure itself, because it won't find the hardware. It's sort
    of a chicken or the egg scenario. :-( It's got me puzzled!
    
    Harry
    

    re: HSOSS1::HARDMAN
    
    As long as you are starting over...
    
    1) boot DOS from diskette
    2) partition and format hard disk
    3) install minimal support for CD-ROM on the hard disk (to run under
    	DOS)
    4) boot DOS from hard disk, with CD-ROM attached
    5) use the winnt/b installation method of installation, preferably
    	with SMARTDRV loaded to speed things up a bit
    
    You can go one better by putting the i386 directory on the hard disk
    and remove the CD-ROM drive from the equation after the initial copy of
    the i386 directory from CD.
    
    Cheers,
    
    /Bill