So, I rebooted my Windows laptop after some update, and was greeted by this surprise!
I guess lucky for me I had the machine tied to a Microsoft account which in turn had the key backed up. After some tedious typing later and I was back in business.
I guess this was the culprit?
BitLocker was so transparently well working I didn’t even know it was even running. Got to give it that much credit. And if anything, probably should just give up and run it everywhere.
I thought I’d give a fellow Canadian a shout out, across the interwebz.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Preparing for Windows NT RISC Exhibition for VCFW 2023, I wanted to have NT running on an IBM RS/6000. This was previously covered in this excellent article by Shoutmon as well in this excellent video by NCommander. However both are missing some crucial information that I had to go through and learn myself the hard way. I hope it will help someone in the future.
Windows NT PowerPC was designed to run on PReP machines, however that by itself is not very useful. Which of the RS/6000 models are REeP and which are not? This is coincidentally answered by NetBSD/prep supported system models.
Firstly there are IBM PC Power Series. Yes IBM PC but with PowerPC CPU, and not to be confused with RS/6000 which is a different IBM product. However the IBM Power Series have equivalent RS/6000 “counterpart” models. WTF IBM.
IBM PC Power Series 440 6015 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7020 40P
IBM PC Power Series 830 6050 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P
IBM PC Power Series 850 6070 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P
There are also other models mentioned by Windows NT 4.0 HCL, namely E20, E30 and F30, and PowerPC ThinkPads. To summarize here is a more definitive list of IBM RS/6000 models supported by Windows NT 4.0:
Model 7020 40P)
Model 7248 43P, 100 and 133 MHz
Model 7248 43P-140 (with a big asterisk)
Model 7024 E20 and E30
Model 7025 F30
ThinkPad 820, 850
ThinkPad 860 (with a big asterisk
If you could pick any RS/6000 machine, the 40P would probably be the most recommended. 40P can also run OS/2 PowerPC if you are in to this thing.
Unfortunately all I had on hand was 43P-140, which is PReP, but it’s not Power Series based and not supported by NT out of the box. WTF IBM. Chances are that you will run in to this as well. 43P-140 are way more popular and easier to acquire than any other hardware listed above.
The main trouble with 43P-140 is that the onboard GPU and NIC will not work with ARC and NT. Yes, you can hack in some generic S3 card (see below). It will work in ARC/NT but not PROM and AIX. I wasn’t happy. Upon some collaboration with Shoutmon and NCcommander and my own research, I was able to find the one and only graphics card that will work in both the RS/6000 PROM as well as ARC BIOS, AIX and Windows NT. The lucky winner is:
IBM FRU 40H5838 aka GTX110P
Update: It’s been tried, tested and verified to use IBM ROM with a regular/stock S3 Trio64V+. You can download it here and program yourself. It will work with both AIX and NT.
As for NIC, there are way more options as it’s not used by PROM, ARC or AIX, just NT. In my case I opted for a standard Etherlink III card.
Once you have the correct hardware bits, NT installation is pretty straightforward with some caveats. You start by booting the ARC 1.51 floppy disk. Then you need to go to Installation and Setup Services, Advanced Installation and then Disk Partition Management Services.
There are 3 types of partitions. Confusing, skipping on creating or trying to merge them in to one partition will not get you far.
\os\winnt\osloader.exe will reside.\WINNT folder.First you create the Boot (ARC) Partition and copy data from ARC floppy disk to the ARC Partition on the hard disk. This will allow booting ARC firmware directly from HDD. At this point you may want to remove the floppy disk, reboot, get to SMS and change boot device to HDD.
Secondly go to FAT Data or System Partition. Make it small like 5MB, then answer Yes to System Partition. This will create the partition for osloader.exe. This is an equivalent of arcinst.exe on Alpha and MIPS.
Thirdly go back to the main menu and select Run Maintenance program. Then type cd:\ppc\setupldr. Once Windows NT setup boots, you will have an unpartitioned space left. create the Windows NT partition, preferably as NTFS.
Note that OSLOADER is on SYSTEMPARTITION. The OSLOADPARTITION is where \WINNT folder is located.
Installation on PowerPC ThinkPads, specifically the 860 is covered here.
Can You Chip In?
I guess not surprising, Internet Archive is under fire yet again, and needs help. Again.
For more than two and a half decades, we have collected, preserved, and shared our digital cultural artifacts. Thanks to the generosity of our patrons, the Internet Archive has grown from a small preservation project into a vast library that serves millions of people each year. Our work has impacted the lives of so many of our users who value free and open access to information.
From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people. Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That’s why we don’t charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects.
If you can’t imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million books and texts, and 14 million audio recordings.
If you find our site useful, please chip in! Your support will help us build the web we deserve.
Thank you for joining me.
Brewster Kahle
Founder & Digital Librarian
And how can I support them by doing not much? BING!
Turns out that BING / Edge(ium) has this point thing for using it, and a tip jar to get Microsoft to fund IA. Every 1,000 points you tip will be $1 in real life?
Maybe it helps, I don’t know, I’d like to think it does. I figure 10,000 points let’s me feel like I’ve done something.
Yay slacktivisim.
Oh, and follow me on archive.org as neozeede! I try to upload strange and interesting things as I find them. Or remember to find them.
Sometimes there is a great seemingly timeless resource on the internet, and you pull from it from time to time, make giant compilations, but never really reach out to the creator, or just archive the entire thing.
Then the unspeakable happens and it just up’s and disappears.
I never reached out to Peter Koch, to even thank him for preserving so much, or to apologise for not preserving his site, for some reason it felt like someone else would have done a better job. But then sometimes you find out you were that one person, and you didn’t do it, so you didn’t do it.
I don’t know the story, but it seems Peter did know that it was coming to and end.
May 01 2010 – Ending
Dear friends!
I have to give up my collection.
So if you’re interested in some pieces or know someone who might, please send me an e-mail.
Peter – Sun3 Zoo
So I’ll put in a call for help for the world at wide? Did anyone save anything more comprehensive than what was in archive.org, or what was in the ‘Titor Special‘?
In the meantime, the site has a new owner, and it’s been restored.
If anyone has any stories or anything preserved it’d be appreciated. There was at least a few parties, and party3, with party2 missing.
Thanks.
I thought I’d slap together some github thing with MS-DOS 2.11 that’s been made buildable thanks to a whole host of other smart people. The default stuff out there expects you to build it under MS-DOS using the long obsoleted ‘append’ utility which can add directories to a search path. Instead I created a bunch of makefiles that take advantage of MS-DOS Player, and let you build from Windows.
building should be somewhat straightforward, assuming you have the ms-dos player in your path. JUST MAKE SURE YOU UNZIP as TEXT mode. If you are getting a million errors you probably have them in github’s favourite unix mode.
D:\temp\dos211-main\bios>..\tools\make
msdos ..\tools\masm ibmbio.asm ibmbio.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83
Warning Severe
Errors Errors
0 0
msdos ..\tools\masm sysimes.asm sysimes.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83
Warning Severe
Errors Errors
0 0
msdos ..\tools\masm sysinit.asm sysinit.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83
DOSSYM in Pass 2
Warning Severe
Errors Errors
0 0
msdos ..\tools\LINK IBMBIO+SYSINIT+SYSIMES;
Microsoft Object Linker V2.00
(C) Copyright 1982 by Microsoft Inc.
Warning: No STACK segment
There was 1 error detected.
msdos ..\tools\exe2bin.exe IBMBIO IBMBIO.COM < 70.TXT
Fix-ups needed - base segment (hex): 70
del -f ibmbio.obj sysimes.obj sysinit.obj ibmbio.exe
D:\temp\dos211-main\bios>As an example building the bios by running make. For the impatiend you can download dos211.zip, which includes a bootable 360kb disk image, and a 32Mb vmdk!
Billed as “NT RISC: Windows NT on RISC machines. Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, Itanium.”, the exhibit demonstrates a lot of work in sourcing & restoring the machines. The exhibit features:
And yes, we’ve even had a few celebs pass by!
Tenox will be there all day Saturday at the The Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, 1401 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA 94043.
H’es located at tables 37-38, exhibit 16.
Update: big thanks to @amarioguy and @ryaxnb for help during the exhibit!
It’s certainly one of those things that I’m surprised I didn’t buy when it was current, but glad binipafruc scanned the set.
PDF’s look nice on an iPad, but maybe that’s me being old.
It’s crazy that once uppon a time, corporations thought developer documentation was a revenue stream to their upstart Operating System. It went as well as you can imagine it would.