Using Windows NT 4.0 drivers on NT 3.51?
As you may know by my signature (as of the writing of this post), I decided to work on building 2 computers within this year; I just got finished building the retro PC which is a Pentium MMX-233 happily dual-booting MS-DOS 6.22 / WFW 3.11 & Windows NT 3.51.
Now I have a question regarding driver compatibility: Is it possible to use drivers for NT 4.0 on NT 3.51? If so, are there any compatibility issues I should be aware about? the piece of hardware that's subject to this issue is the network card which is a Startech PCI Ethernet Card with a Realtek RTL8139 chipset, looking at its supplied driver floppy, the only NT drivers I could find are for NT 4.0 and looking at OEMSETUP.INF inside the directory for those drivers I see that on the header there's info stating that the driver is supposed to work on both NT 3.5x and 4.0 as proven on the code quote below.
BTW I figured that because this is an abandonware site where discussion about getting old software to work is acceptable here, this seemed to be the best place to post this topic, I don't know any other forums specializing in getting something like NT 3.51 to work in a modern world, and I wasn't sure if this was an accepted subject here, feel free to let me know if this is inappropriate.
Thanks.
Now I have a question regarding driver compatibility: Is it possible to use drivers for NT 4.0 on NT 3.51? If so, are there any compatibility issues I should be aware about? the piece of hardware that's subject to this issue is the network card which is a Startech PCI Ethernet Card with a Realtek RTL8139 chipset, looking at its supplied driver floppy, the only NT drivers I could find are for NT 4.0 and looking at OEMSETUP.INF inside the directory for those drivers I see that on the header there's info stating that the driver is supposed to work on both NT 3.5x and 4.0 as proven on the code quote below.
;******************************************************************** ; ; The PCI Ethernet miniport driver oemsetup file ; for WinNT 3.5x, WinNT 4.0 ; (NDIS 4.0 driver) ; ;********************************************************************However, I've actually tried installing the drivers through Windows NT's Network Setup just to see if they would work, but when I try to install it, the card will not function properly, looking at the Event Viewer log from when I've tried this, There's a section that says it failed to load the driver because "the device attached to the system is not functioning" which in my experience usually happens if something detects an incompatible Windows version, so I'm wondering if that's the case, I haven't powered up the system since I've reverted changes so I'm sorry if this seems vague.
BTW I figured that because this is an abandonware site where discussion about getting old software to work is acceptable here, this seemed to be the best place to post this topic, I don't know any other forums specializing in getting something like NT 3.51 to work in a modern world, and I wasn't sure if this was an accepted subject here, feel free to let me know if this is inappropriate.
Thanks.
Comments
I might be remembering wrong, but I thought NT 3.51 used NDIS 3 network drivers. Either way, chances are the comment about NT 3.51 is probably just something that was left in by accident. You would need to consult any formal documentation accompanying the driver to determine compatiblity.
As I recall there is a RTL8139 driver for NT 3.51 out there, but it might not be provided in your driver bundle.