Windows NT

NT Installation Made Easy
To set up a PC with both Windows 95 (or 98) and Windows NT, install Windows 95/98 first. Then, insert the NT CD-ROM and install NT to a different directory. You do not have to place it on a different drive or partition.

Installing Windows 95 after NT is already installed is more difficult. Windows 95 Unleashed, a book by Paul McFedries (www.mcfedries.com/Books/Win95Unleashed/toc-pre.html) has info on Dual-Booting With Windows NT and Installing Windows 95 After Installing Windows NT. To the best of our knowledge, this info is not available for free online, but the book is probably in your local bookstore.

Moving an already installed NT hard drive to a different computer or motherboard is also challenging. Most frequently, you'll find that your system simply crashes at startup with a CAN'T ACCESS BOOT DRIVE error, or some other fatal "blue screen of death." The solution is to reinstall NT on the new system. We'd recommend giving some serious thought to moving forward to Windows 2000 or, when it is available, Windows XP.

Note that, with Windows 2000, you can easily install Windows 9x before or after Windows 2000 with ease. See the Windows 2000 report elsewhere in this section for details.

Once installed, you can choose whether you want Win9x or NT to boot by default, using the System control panel in NT.

Boot Partition for WinNT
BootPart 2.20 is an easy tool for adding one partition in the Windows NT multi boot menu (by samples, OS/2 boot manager or Linux partition). C Source included. Take a look at the BootPart Web page.

Fact: Windows NT supports FAT16 partitions up to 16384MB in size (with 256KB clusters at that size). Note, however, that partitions larger than 2GB are inaccessible to DOS or Windows 9x. Note also that the NT boot partition is limited to 4GB in size, as explained here.

Passwords made easy

TweakUI
After installing and configuring Windows NT 4.0 (see our page of Installation Tips for help in this regard), you will find that you have to type a password to "log on" to Windows NT. To provide this password automatically, just download and install the "TweakUI" control panel. With it, you can choose to have the password supplied automatically. (This does not work if you defined your password as "none." In that case, you still need to press Enter.) It provides many other useful features, too -- see the TweakUI Help file for details.

Hardware Configuration made, um, easier
Be sure you have updated Windows NT with the latest bug fixes. At this writing, Service Pack 6 for Windows NT 4.0 was the latest available. Windows 2000 includes Windows Update, an Internet-based update service.

NT4 lacks Windows 95/98's convenient plug-and-play capabilities. Hence NT4 can be a challenge to configure correctly. (Windows 2000, like Windows 9x, has full plug-and-play functionality.) Be sure you have the latest NT drivers for the hardware you want to use, and read the instructions that accompany these drivers for details on how to install them. Microsoft's web site has info that will help, in the (Knowledge Base) support section.

If Windows NT 4.0 did not identify one or more device connected to your system, refer to Troubleshooting. Generally speaking, you need to look in the Event Viewer to figure out what driver is failing while attempting to load (typically, because the hardware is no longer present on the machine) and then disable the errant device using Device Manager. If the device is a multimedia component such as a sound card, drivers can be added, set up or removed using the Multimedia control panel.

Network problems - or, why easy just isn't the right word sometimes.

Network problems? DO NOT remove TCP/IP, not reboot and then try to reinstall it. This seemingly innocent sequence of events will lead to a very unpleasant problem that results in an error message saying, "Registry service subkey already exists." Why does it occur? As it turns out, when you remove TCP/IP from the network control panel, some of the registry keys are only marked for removal and not actually deleted until you reboot. (This is probably one of the few places that you really do need to reboot after making network changes.) Thus, the registry gets messed up. Microsoft has posted an advisory (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article ID: Q151237) on the topic. Unfortunately, the solution is quite involved. The key piece of information you need isn't mentioned in the advisory: you have to use the program called REGEDT32 (not the standard REGEDIT) to set permissions to "full control."

Although NT 4.0 originally shipped with Internet Explorer 2.0, newer versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer are freely downloadable and highly recommended (There's a beta of IE5.5, if you are adventurous, or the "final" version 5.01). We'd recommend upgrading to at least IE 4.01 SP1 or Netscape Communicator 4.5. Windows 2000 includes Internet Explorer 5.0.
The latest updates available for Windows NT 4.0 are available at Microsoft's Windows Support Page. NTBugTraq has a query engine that can help you keep Windows NT Fixes up to date. More info on NT updates is here.
Link to Microsoft NT Workstation or NT Server pages for current product information.
Here is a collection of Internet Resources related to Windows NT.
Information on Wolfpack, Microsoft's clustering technology for Windows 2000 is here, and further information on clustering here.
Beverly Hills Software’s Windows NT Tech Center at http://www.bhs.com has multiple threads discussing Windows NT 4.0.
PC Graphics and Video magazine is a good source of graphics-related Windows NT info. Recent issues have included numerous NT installation tips.
PC Buyer's Guide's Windows 2000 report includes information on pricing, system requirements, setup information and other tips designed to make the transition to the next generation of NT technology easier.
The NT Compatible site is dedicated to helping you run games under Windows NT. Listings of compatible applications compatible with NT and Windows 2000 are posted at the site.
There are some third-party utilities for Windows NT that add FAT 32 support.

As noted at http://www.telemarkgruppen.no/TSoft/Winternals/fat32_for_NT40.htm, the NT driver from T-Soft (US$39) does not support booting from FAT32 drives and has a few other notable issues.

Or, you can head over to http://www.sysinternals.com/ and add the ability to read FAT32 to NT 4.0 for free.

Beware, however, of potential incompatibilities. The US$39 read/write version of the FAT32 driver for NT 4.0 from Winternals.com, for example, cannot mount partitions modified by Powerquest's Partition Magic. We recommend moving to a newer version of Windows if you need this feature.

SysIntenals.com has several other useful utilities, as well, including NTFSCHK v1.0. If you dual boot between NT 4 and Windows 2000 then your NTFS drives were upgraded to NTFS v5 and you have had to boot into Windows 2000 to check them. With NTFSCHK you can check your NTFS v5 drives from NT 4. There's also NTFS for Windows 98 v1.03 - a full-blown NTFS file system driver for Windows 95/98.

In the future, we'll be adding additional NT information and relevant links to this page. Check back soon!

For Further Reading:

"Default Cluster Size for FAT and NTFS" http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q140/3/65.asp
http://www.paperbits.com - Support center for Windows NT.
If you need a device driver or software/hardware fix for Windows NT, check this site and www.ntcompatible.com
NT Help Desk: NT Error codes explained

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