suresh²êÞ²b±Ë¬²*²hœ®‹(~×(

hello all,

My old Windows NT 4 machine has failed and i have bought a new machine with
the specs below :

Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz
512MB RAM
80 GB Hard Disk

I have tried installing windows NT 4 workstation but failed. Always reboot
at initial screen.

Please help

john john

You will have to break down the disk into smaller partitions for the the
system. NT cannot install on IDE disks larger than 7.8GB but it will
read the other larger partitions once installed. So, create a primary
partition less than 7.8 GB for the system installation and format it to
NTFS or create a partition 4 gig or less and format it to FAT16. See:

Windows NT 4.0 supports maximum of 7.8-GB system partition
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;224526

Windows NT Partitioning Rules During Setup
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;138364

Boot Partition Created During Setup Limited to 4 Gigabytes
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/119497/EN-US/

John

calvin

Hi,

you may have several problems dealing with getting NT4 onto your new hardware -
but don't give up hope, it is possible.

1. Your 80GB hard drive will have to be partitioned, with the system and boot
parttions all to be within the first 7.8GB of space. The remaining 70Gb you can
organise however you see fit, there are no size limitations on the NTFS file
system will concern you. See http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/bigdisk.htm for
information on this.

2. What connection interface are the HDDs - Parallel ATAPI/IDE or SATA ? If
SATA, you will have problems installing unless there are suitable NT4 drivers
for the SATA controller.

3. Being a P4 processor and motherboard I presume it has 'hyper-threading'
capability. In many cases people have reported this causing problems. Disable it
in BIOS. When you actually begin the Win NT4 install has correctly identified
your motherboard and processor as Intel x86 family and that the other hardware
listed looks sensible.

4. Does this new motherboard have on-board video, audio, sound, network etc...
?? You may have trouble getting drivers to support these inbuilt peripherals
under NT4 - the hardware manufacturers (on the whole) are as anxious as
Microsoft to kill NT4 off, by any means possible. that includes DELIBERATELY
making sure that the newest hardware has no driver support :-( If you do find
yourself in an 'unsupported' situation, your only option may be to disable the
'onboard' peripheral and add a plugin item in one of the PCI slots, or video in
the AGP slot - one for which NT4 drivers are available.

Hope this info helps.

Calvin.

suresh²êÞ²b±Ë¬²*²hœ®‹(~×(

Hi calvin and john,

thank you very much for the replies and your help. I have already
partitioned the hard disk to 3GB but still the same problem occurs.

The problem is when the setup files are loading, it hangs after copying
cdrom system driver and it reboots.

please help guys...thanks

suresh

calvin

Hi Suresh,

You may have to give us some more info about exactly where everything fails. You
have of course I presumed checked the obvious things like drive master/slave
jumpers correct cables in use (don't forget ATAPI UDMA cables are not
bi-directional, the connectors are usually marked or colour coded as to which is
the 'motherboard', which is the 'salve' and which is the 'master')

How are you doing the install - booting from the CD or using the 3 startup
floppies and the CD ?

A few other notes:

I would actually come down to 2GB for your Boot Partition (ie: the one that has
the \WinNT folder on it)

If it is larger than 2GB then it will have been created with 'non-standard' 64k
clusters, which may cause you real problems in the future.

My suggested layout:

Primary Partition
C: - System Partition >32MB and < 2GB - this one basically will only have
ntdetect.com, ntldr. and boot.ini on it for NT startup. On my machine I have a
copy of DOS installed here too, so that I can boot back into good 'ol 16 bit DOS
if required.


Extended partition taking up the rest of the disk space

Logical drives within the partition:
D: - Boot Partition any size you like up to a max size that it and drive C: will
fit inside the 7.8GB boundary. If bigger than 2GB will have to be formatted NTFS
- I recommend a NTFS format here anyway for improved security

rest of the space on the extended partit9on as logical drives of any size how
you see fit.

I suggest installing applications in a partition OTHER than D: - it makes life a
lot easier trying to sort out what belongs to the OS and what is clutter created
by applications if the apps live on a separate drive.

I also recommend a separate 'data' partition where all your files (wordprocessor
docs, spreadsheets, mail etc...) can be stored. Separating the data away from
the apps makes it simpler come time to do backups.

Calvin.

john john

Hmmmm.... I wonder if this can help:

Q. I get error 'Setup was unable to copy the following file CDROM.SYS', why?

A. This problem can be caused if you are loading the ATAPI read mode
CD-ROM driver in the config.sys.

1. Edit the config.sys file from the command prompt (cmd.exe)
C:\> edit c:\config.sys
2. Find the Device= line that contains the ATAPI Real Mode CD-ROM driver
3. Edit the line so the /D: switch does not contain the word value
"cdrom", for example
Device=<driver> /d:cdrom
to
Device=<driver> /d:testa
4. Save the file

John

jean-marc drolet

Hi,
following the same idea thanks to confirme my experience.
I'm a experience technician and programmer working at microsoft lab for many
year at the time of windows nt 4 and windows 2000.

but to get to the point here.
I follow everyting that i was thinking like.
Disable everyting hardware that is on board
disable all new feature including cpu cache.

after many test i'm able to get the 'copy' procesdure working and loading
procedure working up to the end.

But now at the time KBDClass.sys is loaded (i don't remember what append
after in the loader procedure) i get a dump screen (no time to read) and
reboot.

any idea what append at that specific step?
or how can i slow down to get the exact error.

( i just discovered i'm starting to be old on this .. lol )