NT 4.0 rumors?
I found some rumors on the Internet saying that NT 4.0 will refuse to install if you have a hard drive bigger than 1024 cylinders (4GB) and/or you have RAM totaling over 256MB. If you could give me an answer, I would appreciate. Thanks in advance! 
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So how exactly do I format - oh wait, never mind, GParted is my friend. But still, you said you could do it on a 20gb hd. My hd is 160gb, I'm not sure if NT will install on that big hard drive. :?: :?: :?:
4GB - not a problem, never was. Hell NT4 could even format FAT16 to 4GB, absolutely incompatible with 9x but by using a different cluster size it could do it.
NOW, there have been issues if NT4 was installed on a partition located AFTER the first 4GB, so ideally in multiboot environments it needs to be the first partition.
Clearly you don't want to do FAT16, NT4 can't natively recognize FAT32 and can't boot from it period.
NT4 does have a problem with drives larger than 8GB, but service pack 4 includes a newer ATAPI.sys driver to resolve this. Since 99% of the isos out there are SP1 or RTM you need to provide a floppy disk with the files to load during the text portion of setup.
The documentation says you're still limited to 8GB for the system partition, this is due to the NT4 version of NTLDR and NTDetect.com, the solution to go higher is to replace them with the Windows 2K or XP boot files.
This walks you through that http://www.nu2.nu/fixnt4/
NTFS itself has zero issues with huge hard drives, but NT4 uses an older version of the file system, service packs add support for the newer 2K version.
BUT, your last caveat is that drives larger than 137GB can't be accessed without using 48-bit LBA, which NT4 never received updates for. An open source atapi replacement was created http://alter.org.ua/soft/win/uni_ata/ that will add 48-bit LBA support to basically every NT version. (I've never used it, but its got directions on how to install it, dunno if you could use this on a floppy too)
Depending on the setup, lack of floppy drive makes this a multi step quirky process.
So depending on the hardware here is a vague plan of action:
Install NT4 on a small FAT16 or tell it to convert to NTFS during setup too, depending on how the old atapi driver is feeling it'll either handle this or choke on the conversion, if it fails install on straight FAT16 for now.
Once you've got it installed and booted, upgrade to SP6a, if you want the 98ish shell updates that IE4 supplies I suggest you do SP3 or SP4, then IE4 with the shell, then IE6/SP6a.
Upgrade the atapi driver with the universal one.
Upgrade the boot files with the 2K versions
If you aren't NTFS yet, do it.
If its still booting, all components that talk to the hard drive are updated, GG moment of truth.
Boot a hirens boot cd or any other partition editor and expand the partition.
Enterprise edition can support up to 64GB of memory but at the time servers could only use 8GB so it's a theory. Most software back then wanted twice the memory then win3.x and win9x for programs. But for workstation it supports up to 4GB of memory but some systems might cap out at 64MB due to NT4's issues to getting the required info from the BIOS. However if it sees 64MB it should be able to use more.
You have to start with a smaller partition, but after the correct fixes are applied you'll be able to expand it larger. If you want to multiboot then sure go ahead and leave it small, you would in theory never fill 8GB either, NT4 won't run a surprising amount of modern stuff.
Here you can see it incorrectly recognizing the drive as a 7555 MB disk even though it later correctly showed the actual usable size on the drive (160GB)
It then warns about knowing its NTFS but not recognizing it as a properly formatted, this is due to utilities formatting it with the 2K or higher version of NTFS.
Telling it to continue anyways denies you and forces a format.
Which then fails...
Also are you doing this in a VM? Are you sure the disk isn't SCSI? (Default in VMware)
That may negate some of these issues as this is more specifically related the ATAPI/IDE drivers.
Also, some SATA controllers can be operated in Compatibility Mode instead of AHCI, and this setting can usually be toggled in the BIOS. Running the SATA controller in compatibility mode will likely alleviate the need for a special driver.
DMA/UDMA support (up to ATA-133) on known and generic DMA on unknown controllers
LBA48 (large drives above 128Gb) support
large drives above 2Tb support (SCSI READ16, WRITE16)
SerialATA support (SATA, SATA-2, SATA-3)
AHCI rev. 0.95 - 1.30 support
NT3.51 (including i386 version), NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, 2005, Vista, 7, ReactOS
So you should be able to make it work.
That's certainly an interesting one to file away for future experimentation, with the user's 160GB hard drive I wouldn't suggest this route.
As for the SATA it can be hit or miss. I've had hard drives that didn't like running in Compatibility Mode.
I also tested using the uniata driver with a sata disk in vmware, it does recognize the full 10GB drive I created, but freezes when attempting to format it, regardless of what size.
Long story short, it can still be doable, it will just take many stages to get all the factors accounted for.