How to upgrade from dos 6.2 to win 3.1

[st6johns]

I have an older sharp laptop with a pII and im trying to up it from dos 6.22 to win 3.1 now heres my problem i have a 20 gig hd and it is saying i only have 30mb i dont get it? if any one can help email me please [email protected] thank you

[Platypus]

st6johns, welcome to VirtualDr.

A little more information about the exact circumstances would help us, has this system really only ever had DOS 6.22 installed? It would then have to be using FAT16, with maximum size 2GB partitions.

What is saying 30MB, the laptop itself or the Win3.1 setup? If a 20GB drive is reported as 30MB at boot-up, it is probably set wrong in the BIOS setup. If the Win3.1 setup program only finds a 30MB partition, that is probably the only FAT16 partition on the drive, maybe the rest of the drive has been partitioned and formatted as FAT32 in the past. DOS/Win prior to Win95 OSR2 cannot utilise the FAT32 file system.

If you're really determined to install Win3.1 and the problem is that the drive is set up FAT32, you would need to boot from a Win95 OSR2 or Win98 boot disk, and delete all the partitions from the drive with FDISK. Anything on the drive would be lost. Then re-start FDISK without accepting the "Large drive" option, this will cause FDISK to create FAT16 partitions. Create an active primary partition (up to 2GB in size) and format it. The Win3.1 setup should then install OK.

If this is actually Win3.11, you will be unable to use the 32-bit disk access feature if you use a partition size larger than 512MB.