WIN NT 3.51 installation HELP!

Anonymous

I have at home a Duron 600, with 384 SD RAM, RAdeon 7000 and its purpose is for playing music and watching movies etc.

Under the hood i have 4 IDE devices.

Primary Master: HDD 10GB - NTFS (Windows XP SP2)
Primary Slave: HDD 80GB - NTFS (music, videos, pictures etc. only for storage)
Secondary Master: DVD-DRIVE
Secondary Slave: HDD 1,2 GB - FAT32

I want to install Win NT Server 3.51 to that 1,2GB HDD and when i boot to dos and go to win nt install dir (on cd-rom) and type: winnt /b (inside i386 folder) setup starts and then says i don't have enough space on my HDD! It also says i need at least 3.5MB of free space for floppyless install!

I don't get it!

Please help, i ran out of ideas :(

nightice

Most likely, the first drive it sees is the 1.2GB drive. However, because it is FAT32, NT has no clue what to do with it and probably thinks it's a corrupted FAT16.

Anonymous

when i run setup, at the bottom it mentions C: drive, which is NTFS. What am i doing wrong? i think setup doesnt see any drives, when i tryed to install DOS 7.1 it posted error saying i don't have any hard disks on my comp.

I formatted that 1,2GB disk from win xp to NTFS, then to FAT, then to FAT32 with default allocation unit and always i have the same problem.

The only difference is that when i formatted to NTFS i could'nt even acces that disk from dos
:(

Q

NTFS is not always the same, each new version of Windows NT included an updated version of NTFS that previous versions can't read. EG. If I format a disk as NTFS in Windows XP, Windows 2000 is not likely going to be able to read it.

Hence, NT 3.51 setup can see your NTFS drives, but doesn't know how to correctly read them. It also sees your FAT32 drive, but rejects it because it can only read FAT.

You might want to try installing NT 3.51 in a virtual machine (EG. VMware or VPC 2007).

-Q

Anonymous

that must be it.

I'm now formating from DOS, i hope it will work now

I need real install for messing around with files, i've seen on some german forum one guy started to copy some system files from win2000 sp4 and win nt 4.0 (replacing 3.51 ones) and gained more functionality, so i'll give it a try

and i want to see how much new stuff you can run on such old OS

Anonymous

no, it still won't install

so what to do now? i should like, use windows nt 3.51 boot floppy to format it so that setup can see my drive or... ?

Where can i find such thing?

Q

Doesn't the NT setup process make you create boot disks?

-Q

Anonymous

yes, but problem is i don't have floppy disk

that's why i have to install with /b parameter

damn

Q

OK, here's my suggestion:

Use fdisk or your favorite partitioning software to create a 256MB partition on that drive. Then, run NT setup and try and get it to detect that. 3.51 is old enough it may just freak out when it sees drives over the old FAT 16 limit of 512.

-Q

Anonymous

ok, i'll try that

but, i've read somewhere that NT 3.51 supports HDD up to 2GB, this one is only 1,2GB...

anyway i'll try and post results, thanks

Q

NT 3.51 might under NTFS, but to format it as NTFS, you have to have 3.51 already installed. You can convert it later, following setup if you want.

-Q

FedeArg

Q wrote:

NT 3.51 might under NTFS, but to format it as NTFS, you have to have 3.51 already installed. You can convert it later, following setup if you want.

-Q

I`m in agreement with you ,Q :idea:

Anonymous

bad news

still the same problem

Right before error at the bottom says: removing old temp files: C:\$WINNT$.~BT, then it says: inspecting computer...

2 sec later, i get error that my disk is full and i need at least 3.5 MB of free space to install...

:(

Anonymous

is it possible to somehow install win nt 3.51 from win xp to that 1,2GB drive?

FedeArg

er.... Format the disk with the command format c: and then with FDISK of W9x; make the main partition FAT16.

Try to install with the disk in FAT16

Don`t use the NTFS that Windows 2000 and XP creates, because it just don`t work

Or you can try with the NTFS that NT 4.0 makes

Have luck

BOD

NT doesn't support FAT32 natively.

FedeArg

BOD wrote:

NT doesn't support FAT32 natively.

OUCH I forgot that ....... sorry I will correct the post

EDIT: Post Corrected

Anonymous

thanks everyone for help BUT

i just found old floppy and few floppy disks, so i'll just unplug all HDDs i have, attach only dvd rom as pri master, and 1,2GB HDD as pri slave and attach floppy and try normal install

i'll post results

thanks again

Lupinthe3rd

All you had to do was format your 1.2 gig drive as FAT16. Then run the install of the cdrom at bnoot up. Or however you are doing it now.

Anonymous

i found out that my floppy is broken...

anyway, i attached only dvd and 1,2gb hdd, formatted C: from dos, now installer says that it cannot copy NT bootloader and should check if my disk is formatted or broken

in FDISK it says it's FAT32, is there a way to format it to FAT16? or convert fat32 to fat16?

Anonymous

:oops:

silly me

i forgot to say NO when fdisk asked me if i want to activate large disk support

i'll format and try again

Anonymous

My computer wrote:

Windows has disabled direct disk access to protect your long filenames. To override this protection, see LOCK /? command for more information.

The system has been halted. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart your computer.

I got that message when i tryed to install win nt :?

nightice

lock c:
winnt

Anonymous

thanks, that worked

FINALLY it's copying files. I hope everything runs smooth from now on.

Thanks again

Anonymous

You'll may have other problems with file corruption during the install as NT 3.51 does not support such modern drive controllers out of the box. You can get updated ATAPI and ATDISK drivers to use prior and during install to make it work well.

This article about virtual PC also applies to any install of NT 3.51 on modern hardware....
http://groups.google.ca/group/microsoft ... 484510263a

Q

Ahh, alter.org.ua. I do remember that dude's pages.

-Q

ascarab

Perhaps the answer is in the elaborate article on BEARWINDOWS:
https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/winnt351.htm

I've successfully created a multi-boot system using four very small FAT16 partitions of 504MiB each and setup 2x NT351 and 2x NT40 from by prepping from MS-DOS and Clonezilla Live! CD-ROM. I let SETUP convert those to NTFS natively. From there I will be enabling LBA and maybe even FAT32 support soon using the special drivers (ATAPI.SYS, ATDISK.SYS respectively SCSIPORT.SYS) mentioned in this article.