Comments on: Installing Windows NT 3.1 on a physical computer

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 02:04:47 +0000

In reply to Yuhong Bao. I never tried, I only kept the 3.x stuff up to 4.0 ..

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 21:19:00 +0000

As a side note, Win2000/NT5 NTLDR has Int 13h extensions support. I wonder if you could use that to boot NT 3.1.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 04:09:10 +0000

In reply to Yuhong Bao. I can't patch my BIOS, so as always I just use the NTLOADER from NT 3.51.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 23:47:35 +0000

I recommend that you see:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-nt-3-1-and-os2-memory-detection/

By: neozeed

neozeed — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 14:38:11 +0000

In reply to Urs Pfister. If I wanted to run it under emulation (like my NT 3.1 Apache server), I would pick a far stronger host machine, than a P4 (or below). The whole point of going native is to actually have the hardware in question. Now if it offered peripheral passthru maybe, but really, if say I was passing thru a video card, and storage, what would I need qemu for? Other than trying to restrict the CPU... but passthru seems to be far more of an art than a science.

By: raijinzrael

raijinzrael — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 06:38:09 +0000

In reply to Urs Pfister.

Yeah, is easy… But then where’s the fun in trying to run the older OS baremetal? And that’s without counting you are limited to the virtual hardware exposed by QEMU, so if you have some ISA hardware, or PCI cards you want to use in your configuration to run certain app or game you’re out. Also QEMU has very poor support for Win9x/3x. Poor Cirrus Video emulation for Win3x and no DirectDraw/D3D/Glide for Win9x. Slow sound because QEMU doesn’t like how 9x kernel handles hardware and CPU, and KVM can’t accelerate it. Really no worth in running these old OSs emulated to actually do something… Specially if you already got a dedicated rig to run them (aka, you aren’t using your work PC to test them).

By: Urs Pfister

Urs Pfister — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 10:05:34 +0000

For any older Windows machines, I recommend using ArchivistaMini with QEMU, it is much much easier to start machines.

Just setup the machine and do not forgot to disable kvm and acpi, and there you go:

http://archivista.ch/avmini.iso (distribution to do it)
http://archivista.ch/cms/language/en/news-blog/archivistabox-2016x

In this manner, I did run any Windows 9.x/NT machines for years without any problems.

By: A. Kohl

A. Kohl — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 21:44:25 +0000

It should be NT3.5 and below which use ATDISK.SYS. For 3.51 and higher you can try the UNI-ATA driver http://alter.org.ua/en/soft/win/uni_ata/ (it comes with sources).

By: raijinzrael

raijinzrael — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 21:02:57 +0000

Still, to get speedier setups with NT3.1, you really want to use a SCSI card with proper NT3.1 drivers, and a SCSI disk. NT4 and less don’t use ATAPI.sys/SCSIPORT.sys for IDE HDDs, but the unoptimized slow and CPU/interrupt intensive dog ATDISK.sys, a very basic ST506/WD100x driver which doesn’t even know how to do proper MWDMA/UDMA transfers.