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Windows NT 3.51 Installation error (INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEIVCE)

NT 3.51 (and 4.0) was always VERY touchy about boot devices. If it happened to have loaded the right driver all was well, but if it moved to the next phase of setup and the right driver is not loaded then this is what happens.

How was the installation started? With boot diskettes? or invoked from DOS? I found that if you have the source files on a CD or something there wasn't an NT driver for that launching from DOS with the command to copy all the files to a FAT partition first could be a workable plan. You can always convert the partition later using the convert command (assuming NT 3.51 had that already).
 
alank2 said:
NT 3.51 (and 4.0) was always VERY touchy about boot devices. If it happened to have loaded the right driver all was well, but if it moved to the next phase of setup and the right driver is not loaded then this is what happens.

How was the installation started? With boot diskettes? or invoked from DOS? I found that if you have the source files on a CD or something there wasn't an NT driver for that launching from DOS with the command to copy all the files to a FAT partition first could be a workable plan. You can always convert the partition later using the convert command (assuming NT 3.51 had that already).
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I was in dos when I started the installation by cd. So you’re saying I should copy all the files to the hard drive and start the installation from there?
 
Bluremii said:
I was in dos when I started the installation by cd. So you’re saying I should copy all the files to the hard drive and start the installation from there?
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You don't copy them, setup does as a preprocess. Run "WINNT /?" and see if there is an option for this. I think it might be /ox or something like that, but it has been a long time and I could be wrong.
 
I recently did a clean install of NT 4.0 Terminal Server on a 4GB CF drive. I recall that the primary (installation) partition had to be <504MB. Secondary partitions could be much larger.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I recently did a clean install of NT 4.0 Terminal Server on a 4GB CF drive. I recall that the primary (installation) partition had to be <504MB. Secondary partitions could be much larger.
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During the text based portion of the NT installation, it is possible to create and format partitions. The maximum size for an NTFS partition is very large (16 exabytes), however the maximum size for a FAT partition under NT is 4GB (2GB under DOS). If you format a partition as NTFS during NT installation, it originally formats it as FAT and then converts it in the final stages of the NT installation, and this you are limited to a maximum partition size of 4GB during the NT installation.
 
Could have something to do with differences between the BIOS real-mode drivers and the NT PM drivers. I do recall being baffled by the limitation, however. Motherboard system was an old P1 job (Amptron, I think).
 
Chuck(G) said:
Could have something to do with differences between the BIOS real-mode drivers and the NT PM drivers. I do recall being baffled by the limitation, however. Motherboard system was an old P1 job (Amptron, I think).
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It's been a while since I installed NT 4.0 on anything, but I use the 3 floppys and CD routine and seems to work okay. Once the initial install is out of the way, an you are into NTFS, you can go ahead and expand the boot partition to 7.8GB if you wish. The partition limiting fact would be if you chose FAT and that would be 2GB.
 
To demonstrate how early LBA drives were handled, I had a P1-equipped HP Vectra with about an 8GB hard drive attached. I could load up the drive and everything booted and ran fine. But if I tried to move the same drove to a different non-HP system, it flopped during boot. Similarly vice-versa didn't work. Took me awhile to track that one down--the HP used a translation routine that maxed out heads at 254; everyone else used 255.
 
Chuck(G) said:
To demonstrate how early LBA drives were handled, I had a P1-equipped HP Vectra with about an 8GB hard drive attached. I could load up the drive and everything booted and ran fine. But if I tried to move the same drove to a different non-HP system, it flopped during boot. Similarly vice-versa didn't work. Took me awhile to track that one down--the HP used a translation routine that maxed out heads at 254; everyone else used 255.
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I'm curious. How did you figure that one out.
 
Examined the disk a track at a time to see how/if it agreed with the partition table. Very frustrating. Finally compared the parameters returned by the BIOS calls.
 
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