Tech said:
Sorry I know this question belongs in a different NG, but the NT 4 NG seems
to have porn and not many answers even after I post, so I thought I would
ask here.
I have an old Pentium 166 that had NT4.0 on it. I re-formatted the drive
and was to reinstall NT4 clean. Now for some reason it will no longer
recognize the CD drive to boot from, and the only floppy it sees is a
Windows 95 boot disk. Any other boot disk (floppy) fails.
Any ideas???
Win98 2nd edition might be a more useful choice for that old comp
although NT4 does run noticeably faster and is more secure. W98 is a
breeze to install compared to NT4 but I guess it depends on what you
want to use the comp for. The CD and/or floppy drives may not be in the
best of condition. Try swapping in known working drives to see if that
is the problem. Also take the beastie apart to clean out the fuzzies and
ensure all connections are secure. Since that is such an old computer it
may not be able to boot from CD. A previous comp I owned (newer that
yours - P2-400) ran NT4 and was not able to boot from CD in any useful
configuration, only the floppy or whatever device was connected as
primary master were bootable despite what the BIOS setup screens advertised.
You didn't mention if you have the three NT4 setup floppies for the
install. If you don't, they can be made from the NT4 CD by issuing the
command:
D:\i386\winnt /ox
from a DOS prompt. *Any* DOS prompt where the CD is accessible will do.
Substitute your CD drive letter for D:, it probably would be bumped up
to E: if for example you use a friends W98 recovery floppy to boot from
A: (it adds a RAM drive as D
or if there is a 2nd hard drive on board.
That is an OH not a zero in 'ox' by the way. Have three fresh 3.5
floppies on hand and label them as instructed by NT. When done reboot
from setup floppy #1, you will be able to format the drive (FAT16 and
NTFS only) and create whatever partitions are needed during the install.
By the way browse the CD first to see where winnt.exe resides, I've
been told that on some versions its in the root instead of the i386
directory although I have never personally seen a CD arranged that way.
Also the command 'winnt /?' will display available options. If you have
the use of another comp running 32 bit Windows (98 or newer) you can
issue the command:
?:\i386\winnt32 /ox
via /Start/run to make the floppies there instead. Substitute the
correct CD drive letter for '?:' on the borrowed comp.
If this all works, get and install service pack 6a as *soon as
possible*. Its well worth the download time and actually turns NT4 into
a useful OS.
HTH,
John
