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How picky is NT 4.0 with CPUs?

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hunterjwizzard

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Whilst going through a box of old components I stumbled on a 50 pin SCSI hard drive. This drive came out of a machine my dad brought home from work and used for a while, then gave me to fiddle with. I recall that it ran Windows NT 4.0 on some kind of Pentium 1(I think 166MHz but not sure).

When I eventually trashed the computer, my dad asked me to save the hard drive in case he needed some of the data off of it later. This was 25+ years ago now and he hasn't asked for it once.

But I thought it might be fun to try and boot the drive. So the original question becomes: how picky was NT about what processors it will boot on? If I try and fire this drive up on say a Pentium iii is it going to freak out?
 
It’s not CPUs NT is picky about, it’s everything else.

I don’t have the time (or the inclination) at the moment to go into my full NT 4.0 rant, but the very short version is this: it’s *possible* to install it on machines much, much newer than it is, well into the Pentium 4 Xeon era. (NT was crazy popular with institutions like banks that are *very* conservative about changing anything in their software stack.) But doing it *right* is a black art that involves a huge amount of busy work finding drivers, putting them into forms that the OS can read when it’s mostly broken (lots of chicken-and-the-egg problems), rebooting dozens of times… and if you do some things in the wrong order you can screw it up in unrecoverable ways and have to start over. I had to install it just a tiny handful of times between 2000 and 2005, and I would never, ever do it again. (The last time was me installing it to a VMware image and explaining that if they wanted any more machines they would get a server with VMware on it, I would quit before installing it bare metal.)

Admins who ran NT shops learned the dark incantations that allowed them to put together slipstreamed installation disks for their new hardware because otherwise running a datacenter full of it would be absolute madness. Have fun!
 
… that said, here’s the less pessimistic version: if you use a later NT 4.0 disk with the service packs already on it and pick a reasonably generic PIII system based on something common like a 440BX chipset you shouldn’t have *too* much trouble. But still expect it to be painful and arcane compared to any later version.

… doh! And now I realize you’re asking not about installing it, but booting a drive from another machine. That… is a different ball game.
 
Yeah from your rant it is sounding like booting the existing install to anything other than the exact system it came out of is a no-go. Ah well, this certainly wasn't important. I am looking forward to showing it to my dad next time he comes over. Right along with the 8 bit ISA MIDI card from our 386 that also had me save "UST IN CASE". The MIDI card I might actually get some use out of.
 
Also to note that NT4 has ZERO USB support. Microsoft released an official statement that they would never implement a USB driver stack for NT4, even after 6 service packs.

There are third party USB drivers, but there be dragons. Here is one that I remember: https://web.archive.org/web/20091026192433/http://geocities.com/mypublic99/

I've only used NT4 a handful of times over the years and I hated it every single time. If you so much as looked at it in a way that didn't please it, it would have fits and break.
 
As I recall, windows NT 4 post SP4 was pretty darned good and the first version that I thought eclipsed Novell Netware for reliability/usability.
 
As always CPU and RAM are the least of your worries, everything else can be a headache, especially software support.
In the age of NT4 there were a million of storage controllers, chipsets and graphics adapters on the market. The OS has its own driver model which is not compatible with either 95, 98 or 2000. A lot of the hardware doesn't have drivers. From my personal experience, OEM boxes are better supported than what you'd build yourself in those days.

You're highly likely to break the NT4 somehow if you just boot it in a 'foreign' computer due to all the changed hardware, especially something as late as Pentium III chipset which might not even have storage drivers available. Try it, see where it gets you, in any case you can always just mount that HDD on anything that reads NTFS if you want to find out what software is there and is there any interesting user data.
 
I remember NT4 refusing to install on NexGen cpus. It detected them as 386. Worked fine if you installed on a different machine and moved the hard drive over to the NexGen system and ran wonderfully.
 
Probably what I'll do in that case is get my win2k box reassembled and try to image the drive. At the very least I can see if any files survived, then play around with the image. Getting it to boot in a VM shouldn't be tough. I could also image it to a flash drive and try booting off that just to laugh when it fails.
 
NT was the second OS I ever had to deal with where prior to installing the OS I had to do an exhaustive search for compatible drivers and when prompted, fed them to the system one at a time. Yes it is VERY sensitive to screwing up the config and forcing you to start over again.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I don’t have the time (or the inclination) at the moment to go into my full NT 4.0 rant, but the very short version is this: it’s *possible* to install it on machines much, much newer than it is, well into the Pentium 4 Xeon era. (NT was crazy popular with institutions like banks that are *very* conservative about changing anything in their software stack.)
Click to expand...

I worked at a place that ran NT 4.0 on Dell Optiplex GX260 which are P4. Looking at Dell's website they will let you pick NT 4.0 on their drivers site all the way up to GX280

GiGaBiTe said:
Also to note that NT4 has ZERO USB support. Microsoft released an official statement that they would never implement a USB driver stack for NT4, even after 6 service packs.

There are third party USB drivers, but there be dragons. Here is one that I remember: https://web.archive.org/web/20091026192433/http://geocities.com/mypublic99/

I've only used NT4 a handful of times over the years and I hated it every single time. If you so much as looked at it in a way that didn't please it, it would have fits and break.
Click to expand...
This same place that I worked had a bunch of IBM Thinkpads that were USB only, and they wanted to be able to use external mice and keyboards. IBM had a driver for them to use because they didn't want to miss out on the sale, it looks like maybe this is it: https://thinkpads.com/support/Think....com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/usbacc1d.txt

Also we had issues all of the time because we would ghost an image to identical hardware, but ghost would let us use all 40GB of the drive, and NT will BSOD if the system files get pushed out past around 8GB.
 
NeXT said:
NT was the second OS I ever had to deal with where prior to installing the OS I had to do an exhaustive search for compatible drivers and when prompted, fed them to the system one at a time. Yes it is VERY sensitive to screwing up the config and forcing you to start over again.
Click to expand...
Which version of NT? What you described was how NT 4.0 operated... But the strange thing is I dont remember it being that way with NT 3.51.
 
Spot on. NT 4.
I built a dual pentium Pro machine a number of years back and discovered the AWE32 drivers were so horrible and crashy it fragged my install and I had to start over again.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
There are third party USB drivers, but there be dragons.
Click to expand...

Zare said:
In the age of NT4 there were a million of storage controllers, chipsets and graphics adapters on the market. The OS has its own driver model which is not compatible with either 95, 98 or 2000. A lot of the hardware doesn't have drivers. From my personal experience, OEM boxes are better supported than what you'd build yourself in those days.
Click to expand...

My worst experience with NT was a Microsoft SQL developer who wanted it on a Pentium III laptop that came with Windows 98 pre-installed. (This was in mid-2000.) Dell *did* sell a version of the laptop with NT pre-installed (Windows 2000 was also an option), but the company didn't want to buy specials when we had the usual in stock. We actually had two of these SQL developers, and *one* of them was perfectly happy with Windows 2000 (the software both of them needed ran on 2000), but no, this other guy insisted he wanted NT 4.0 and didn't want to do it himself, and I drew the short straw to try to make it happen.

I wasted like two days on this. Like I said, Dell would actually sell you a preloaded version, but what I rapidly found out was it wasn't actually possible to reconstruct the preload configuration just from what was on the website and a generic NT install disk. The preload included several proprietary driver stacks (a limited USB driver, a PCMCIA/Cardbus support package...) and some other pieces of duct tape that cost significant money if you bought them on their own, and the rest of the drivers didn't really add up to a working system without those pieces. Someone dug up a copy of ... Systemsoft Cardware? so I wasn't allowed just then to throw the towel in, but then, yeah, after hours plugging away something went bad with one of the installs and I had to start over, and at the end of that second attempt I *kind* of had it running... except the PCMCIA support just utterly failed with the Orinoco Wavelan card and power management completely didn't work. The user whined about those problems, and that's where I ran it up the chain. We took the laptop back, slapped Windows 2000 on it (which worked absolutely perfectly), and told him if after a week he really thought he needed NT he could make the case to the CFO to buy a special laptop for him. (This was a 40 person startup so, yes, the "CFO" had their nose directly in IT expenditures.)

And yeah, of course, Windows 2000 was fine and the whole affair was a huge waste of time. My opinion of NT has not improved since.
 
Here what I remember about NT 4.0 from around 1999-2000:

I used NT 4.0 on my shop server and also on my laptop and desktop units while with the feds. The desktop PC was a PIII and then a P4. I can't remember what was stuffed into to Gateway laptop. The software, other than the server, was primarily Motorola service software for programing handheld, mobile, base station, and repeater radios. On the investigative side, we used it to control dialed number recorders (DNRs) and other proprietary investigative software. Administrative use on the desktop saw PC Anywhere, Banyan Vines, and a Microsoft Office Suite. To be sure, NT was click-click and sure footed for our purposes. There was never any hitches other than some rare system hardware glitch or failure. We used H/P Post Script printers exclusively, as well as an H/P scanner, both of which were parallel interfaced to the desktop unit. Most of out PC's were Gateway and then there was a trend toward Dell. We were constantly provided with the latest hardware.

PC Hardware on NT 4.0 was a tricky area when installing drivers, especially if the home office sent a new video card to be installed. We had no or very limited IT back in those days, and if you couldn't crack into a PC case or know which end of the screwdriver to pickup, you were SOL.

Major software updates and/or mods were accomplished by jerking out the hard drive and FedExing it back to HQ. Sometimes you were directed to rebuild the drive on site. In that case you needed to have a little savvy concerning NT. If mem serves correct the primary max boot partition is no more than 4GB. However, if you're lucky, and have an image, then you could lay down a partition of about 8GB. After the primary partition it's the sky's the limit. The next step after you were up and running was to apply the SP's. We found that they needed to go sequentially from 1 to 6. Now, later versions of NT 4.0 had some SP's included.

The major failing with NT was no or limited USB support which was coming into vogue in the early 2K's. The only NT USB app that I knew of at the time was a mouse driver. Of course, there were those who attempted to hammer in USB where ever they could and then along came XP.

For our purposes, back in those days, it was a rock solid OS and got the job done, especially on the server. No major software glitches or gotchas. So, if you have an era Pentium or equivalent, give it a shot.
 
Agent Orange said:
Major software updates and/or mods were accomplished by jerking out the hard drive and FedExing it back to HQ.
Click to expand...

As much as I despise NT I would never argue that the admins that acquired the necessary skills to run these giant NT deployments didn't earn their money. And NT *was* a stable and reliable OS when it was installed properly on reliable hardware; if you were setting up a computer to be a server or appliance it did the job. (We had an NT-based telephone system at the startup, a Pentium II-grade PC in a rack-mount case with like 20 ISA slots holding analog PBX cards, and, sure, it worked. But we didn't set it up, it was an appliance.) But it was a *terrible* OS to troubleshoot if anything went wrong and could be *remarkably* fragile if an administrator just took a single wrong step. Most elite Windows NT techpriests I've met have basically admitted that the solution to most critical failures was to wipe it and start over.
 
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I had to supply a floppy drive for a hospital machine in like 2019. They don't change ANYTHING on those mamajamas unless they absolutely HAVE TO.
 
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