For some reason I started to convert my old CD collection to ISO files today, and encountered some very old disks from MSDN.
Just for fun I decided to install Windows NT4 Server. It turned out to be a little more trick than I had expected.
The first problem is that this DVD is not bootable. There are versions of NT4 that was delivered on bootable CDs, but these multi-versions disk are not.
I tried creating the installation floppy disks, but that also fails. The floppy based installation requires your I386 folder to be in the root directory of your disk, and that is not the case for this media.
Finally I was able to recall the procedure, and I not documenting it here for you if you have the same problem.
- Get hold of a DOS boot disk with CDROM support. Windows 95 or 98 will also do.
- Boot the computer and use FDISK to create a primary partition. If you are prompted to “Enable large disk support (Windows 95b or later), make sure to answer NO.
- Reboot and format the C: drive.
- If your boot disk is of Windows 95 or later, type LOCK C: to allow direct disk access to the file system.
- Go to the installation folder for your preferred windows version and type WINNT /B. The /B parameter tells the setup program to skip creation of installation disks.
- The installation files will be copied to the hard drive and after a reboot the installation will continue from the hard disk.
Don’t worry about the having the FAT for file system, you will be prompted to convert it to NTFS during the installation.