Ummmm not sure why it won't work in NT if the serial is working in the BIOS.
However I'm curious as to what you mean by it won't let you ditch it and put 98 on or re-install NT. There is nothing that can be done anywhere on the machine to prevent this from happening.
If it's NTFS then you can only change the partitions from withing windows you can't use a tool such as fdisk to change the partition tables. If it's FAT32 then it's wide open stick in a win98 boot floppy with fdisk on it ang go to town.
If it's NTFS it's a little tricker easiest way is if you have a win2k cd or XP just boot up with those in the drive (if it can boot from CD) or load them from inside of NT and just start a new install which will allow you to wie out the partitions as you please.
If it's an older system and it sounds like it is you could probalby do a low level format perhaps from withing the bios since there was often a setting or maybe by finding the drive tools and making a disk of them.
FDisk should allow you to delete the NTFS partitions. You just have to choose the non-dos partition or whatever it's called. I forget. I haven't used FDisk in a while.
Depends I've had issues in the past trying to use FDisk on an NTFS partition in that it won't allow you to delete it because it's looking for a non-existant extended partition.
And I though that the last service pack in NT allowed for the use of USB.
Do you have an administrator account set up on that machine and you are just going in as limited or Power User? That would stop you from gaining access to the partition tables.
w95 and w98 are very similar in appearance and general use so if you can use one you can use the other.
Fdisk at it's core works like this boot up with a bootable floppy at the command prompt type FDISK then choose 3 to delete partitions and then remake them using option 1. This will only make fat32 partitions.
Comments
However I'm curious as to what you mean by it won't let you ditch it and put 98 on or re-install NT. There is nothing that can be done anywhere on the machine to prevent this from happening.
If it's NTFS then you can only change the partitions from withing windows you can't use a tool such as fdisk to change the partition tables. If it's FAT32 then it's wide open stick in a win98 boot floppy with fdisk on it ang go to town.
If it's NTFS it's a little tricker easiest way is if you have a win2k cd or XP just boot up with those in the drive (if it can boot from CD) or load them from inside of NT and just start a new install which will allow you to wie out the partitions as you please.
If it's an older system and it sounds like it is you could probalby do a low level format perhaps from withing the bios since there was often a setting or maybe by finding the drive tools and making a disk of them.
Lots of options.
And I though that the last service pack in NT allowed for the use of USB.
w95 and w98 are very similar in appearance and general use so if you can use one you can use the other.
Fdisk at it's core works like this boot up with a bootable floppy at the command prompt type FDISK then choose 3 to delete partitions and then remake them using option 1. This will only make fat32 partitions.