Gonna Bring It On Home To You

So I decided to give Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 a go on a Virtual PC today just to see how it would work out in a modern virtualized environment.

My first two attempts went badly.  We shall see what we shall see in the future.

To begin fired up a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, mounted the .iso file I made from the CD I bought ages ago, snagged the Windows NT 3.51 boot floppy images from the NT page at allbootdisks.com and got started.

To start with, everything went fine...

Installed some drivers.

 Kicked out an error message about the hard drive.

 Let me go on anyway.

 Examined the disk.

 Told me that it didn't like what it saw and could we pretty please get rid of everything and start fresh.  I told it yes.

 Brought up the good old Setup Menu we all know and love from the Windows 3.x days.

 Then it decided that it hates the world and wants nothing to do with functioning ever again.  Ah well.  On to plan B....

Plan B involved snagging a Windows 95 bootable floppy image from...You guessed it! Allbootdisks.com!

 Let it start up.

 Let it find the cd-rom drivers.

 Goodness me, how I have missed fdisk!

 Set the disk up using fdisk.exe, format it and keep on keeping on.

 Let it do it's thing.

 Give it a name.

 Whoo!  We are done and ready to start it up from the cd.

 Track down the installation stuff, in this case it is "R:\i386\winnt.exe"

 But before we do this, we need to lock the disk.  Otherwise it doesn't even bother.

 

The purpose of this is to find out which commands we need to run with it.  The /b sets it up so as to not make bootable floppy disks, and the /w sets up for converting the disk to the NTFS format later on. 

 So now we go and run our setup commands.

 Tell it where the files are living.

 Let it do it's thing.  On a side note.  The setup choked when it got to the file "banana.ani" which turns the mouse pointer into a banana.  The reason this happened was because the cd-rom driver was named banana for some unknown reason.  You can just ignore the error and it will keep copying files without any problems.

 Now here we go.  The MS-DOS based portion is completed.  Let us restart and see what we shall see!

 Setup is doing it's thing...Good so far.

 Still doing it's thing...Still good so far.

And there we go...Still hates the world and still wants nothing to do with anything.  Ah well, I guess I shall try again another time.