Having problems installing Windows NT 3.5 on Vmware

sgtsnazzy

Hello,

I've been doing a series on past operating systems on my Youtube channel, I've been wanting to do a video on Windows NT 3.5 but I've run into some problems....
I downloaded the NT 3.5 Workstation ISO from your website and started with the boot floppies first. After putting in disk two it tell me to restart my computer.

It didn't give me a halt error, but it basically hanged at the the blue screen that says "1 processor" basically giving the version number and basic information

If you need anymore details regarding the hardware configuration, please let me know.

I'm also having some problems installing NT 3.1 but I'll save that for another post

SomeGuy

NT 3.1 and 3.5 have all kinds of timing and driver issues that prevent them from running on later hardware. I think somewhere there is a list of patches needed to get these to run on VirtualBox/VMWare or newer hardware. But I don't have that list off hand.

PS please don't try and link to that site, you might notice it gets autocorrected to something else around here.

yourepicfailure

Create a new VM, this one's shot.
When it asks you the vmware version, select the oldest you can find. Everything else goes as normal.
VMWare will nag you to upgrade to a newer vmware version setting, don't. NT 3.XX doesn't work well with the machine virtualized in later versions.

Hence the stall.

calvinb

For NT 3.51, you need to change the VM version to 5.x or so. Newer versions involve an AGP aperture that confuses NT.

For older versions, you need to change the setup INF files to confirm your CPU is a Pentium no matter what CPUID says.

For NT 3.1, you need to attach your CD to the SCSI bus or get an ATAPI capable IDE driver.

sgtsnazzy

That makes sense, I remember installing a NT 3.1 and 3.5 on Workstation 5.0 on an old Windows 2000 PC I'll try that and see if that works.

sgtsnazzy

ampharos wrote:

For NT 3.51, you need to change the VM version to 5.x or so. Newer versions involve an AGP aperture that confuses NT.

For older versions, you need to change the setup INF files to confirm your CPU is a Pentium no matter what CPUID says.

For NT 3.1, you need to attach your CD to the SCSI bus or get an ATAPI capable IDE driver.

So I changed the configuration, I decided to install from the floppy images because even though I changed the CD-ROM to SCSI it still was not recognized. I went through the blue screen install (Disks 1-9) then restarted. I went to the configuration recovery menu and entered "Use Current Startup Configuration" then it gave me a halt BSOD.



I don't know what to make of this, the Windows NT 3.x BSOD are hard to decipher versus the more simpler 9x and NT 5.x and later screens

theotherosproject

0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE is the BSOD error at the top.

If you're using VMware, the virtual hard drive may be set to use the SCSI interface -- I've had a lot of problems getting NT 4.0 working on VMware (BSOD after installation) until I set it to IDE. Perhaps that might help in your case.