Need Computer Help with Operating System NT 4

Thanks to all Freeprs who respond. This is a great site for conservative values.

http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html

Go to the following web site and read how to solve your problems. Good luck.

http://www.wtblock.com/resume/CantBoot.htm

dvwjr

"....Please contact your system administrator." Hey wait a minute! I AM the system administrator!

This probably isn't what you want to hear but I ran NT4 from 1995 through 2000. Win2k Pro makes NT4 look like a POS. If I were in your position, I would go get a new hard drive, get a copy of Win2k Pro, do a fresh installation, then install your old hard drive(s) as secondary drives and recover whatever it is you need to salvage. NT4 is seriously obsolete and a pain in the you-know-what compared to Win2k. You'd be doing yourself a favor, take it from somebody that knows.

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Did it happen right after midnight? It's probably the Y2K3 problem I've been trying to warn everyone about.

- The system partition or the boot partition of the Windows NT 4.0 Workstation installation is greater than 7.8 gigabytes.

If you have access to something like Partition Magic, then repartition your drive down to under 7.8G before you reinstall, unless you are installing NT4 with the Service Packs "slipstreamed" into the install, otherwise NT4 will have a hard time with the partition.

- The partition in question is formatted in the NTFS file system.

Go to: Free NTFS for DOS for the necessary files to mount NTFS partitions if you only have regular boot disks (Win9x/DOS) and haven't made NT boot disks, this might help you recover some files in a last ditch effort, note it won't help you copy to your other partitions necessarily. Read the Sysinternals page.

If I reinstall NT4 from the Installation disks. Will the data acculumated todate be overwritten in other partitions be overwritten. I have drive C 8 gb, Drive D 8 gb, Drive E 12 gb? My operating system lives in Drive C.

As long as you reinstall to the C: partition, NT4 should not touch the other partitions.

My favorites, and Emails in Winnt I would like to salvage.

Your favorites are going to be under "c:\winnt\profiles\administrator\favorites" (or whatever the account you were using is). You really need the pro NTFSDOS program that I mentioned above. I will suggest a solution at the end.

If I can not build a bootable NT disk, will a complete NT 4 installation destroy the favorite directory in WINNT, or will the reistall leave it alone as the operating system is reinstalled.

To be honest, I am not sure, I never reinstalled NT4 over itself in a situation where I had data present. You might check Groups @Google for more info.

I would resize the boot partition (your current C: drive) down to as small as possible with the current data you have on there (your hosed up NT4 installation, your data, etc.), and convert it to a logical partition and slide it down the partition table, and then with the free space from the resizing, create a new primary partition and do a clean install. This does two things - you get a clean install without the danger of any corrupt files (you mentioned your HDD crashed at some point), and you have access to all of your data from your old C: (the drive would now probably be D:) and can pull it off at your leisure without having to jump through more hoops. Once your satisified that you have all data off of your old C:, you can delete the partition and either pull the extra space back into your C: or put it on your D:

Two things jump out at me that I want to mention - one, it sounds like your lucky and smart and kept most of your data off of the C: drive. To save yourself hassle in the future, go into IE every week or two and export your favorites to an HTML file on your data/backup partitions. Also, as far as e-mail, under Windows, I would use Pegasus E-Mail for a few reasons (it's free, it's less likely to have the trojan/virus/script problems) the biggest of which all of your e-mail data is saved to a single directory, and you could literally copy that once a week to another drive, and if you had a crash, reinstall the OS and copy that Pegasus directory back to your C: drive (or just keep it on the D: drive to start with) and your good to go. I'm sure other programs are capable of doing this, I've really only used Pegasus over the past four years or so when I've used e-mail under Windows.

PM me if you need more info on what I've just described.

"...get a COPY of Win2k Pro..."

Watch it, Bill Gates will be hunting you down now....

This behavior occurs when all the following conditions are true:
- Your computer's operating system is Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation.
- The system partition or the boot partition of the Windows NT 4.0 Workstation installation is greater than 7.8 gigabytes.
- The partition in question is formatted in the NTFS file system.

Ugh. At least this serves as a warning. I have a tool at work that at present only runs on NT4. If I have to put it on a new machine I will not use NTFS!

Well, as a network administrator, I concurr with the thought that you should upgrade to Win 2K, at the minimum. The only caveat about upgrading to win 2k, is make sure your computer meets the minimum requirements as set out by microsoft. Since you have two spare hard drives, which you say, have been backed up, you could format one, and install win 2k, on one of these. If you can't install win 2k, and need to re-install winnt, you will have some issues to deal with. The installation disks will only install the basic operating system, without any of the service packs that you have installed since. You will be downloading all day, to get all the service packs. Another issue, is that when you do an operating system "overlay" as we call it, is that you will lose your current system administrator password, and will have to login with the system administrator password that was used to initially install the operating system. Without a doubt, the correct way to go is a "clean" installation, of whichever operating system you intend to run. Personally, I'd suggest Win XP, again, if your system meets the minimum requiremnts, as it is at its core, win 2k, but with some enhancements. Most win 2k drivers will run under win xp, and it is more user friendly than win 2k. Personally, win 2k is my favorite operating system, as far as windows based operating systems go. There are other alternatives, which are based on Linux, which may be worth investigating, and one that I'd recommend is a windows/linux variant, which goes by the name of Lindows. Probably the easiest linux system to get up and running, and is fairly user friendly. Good Luck, especially if you intend to stay with Win NT 4.0.

You said your HD crashed I guess the first point of business is did you replace the HD or reformat the one you already had in the machine.

The first Error listed was an I/O error which is related to your Hard Drive -- This either means the old HDD is no longer fully with us or the drive you put in to replace it with is not properly jumpered. If I read correctly the code the 0000001 indicates that the drive is a secondary

Having said that NT is a very fussy system which brings us to a second level of possible problems when this drive was installed that is the driver issue -- was Nt able to natively recognise this hard drive and if not are youu SURE that the driver you selected is working properly -- to check this you need to check in driver manager se if the IDE bus is connected as well as the HD(s)

Anyway this is a start

Richard

...or Bush2000 LOL! I wonder where he is? He seems so "helpful" anytime something Micro$oft or Linux comes up around here. Seems he should have a solution himself...

Cute I am the ....

I run both NT and 2000 on a network. Yep, NT4 has not been supported by MS for several years. Most of my NT's have run for years, yes years without reinstall. My Dell 400 purchased in May 1996 for one.

I hear ya on 2000. 2000 can not hold a candle to Directory display and flexablity of operation.

Thanks for the reboot tip. It will be my last resort.

chicagofarmer

I having trouble building or locating a bootable NT4 floppy disk.

It's been a while since I dealt with NT4, but if you can get to another system, run the command:

WINNT.EXE /OX

from the i386 directory on the NT4 CD. This will let you create the 3 boot floppies. Then boot from the floppy #1 and insert the disks as it requests. You will get to an option that will allow you to choose to do a "repair", which should allow you to get the bad file (if that is the cause).

Decrease the boot partition size and the system partition size below 7.8 gigabytes.

You would need something like Partition Magic to do this. (A great program to have if you deal with partitions.)

If I reinstall NT4 from the Installation disks. Will the data acculumated todate be overwritten in other partitions be overwritten. I have drive C 8 gb, Drive D 8 gb, Drive E 12 gb? My operating system lives in Drive C.

No. You can choose the partition where it will install NT4. Just don't choose one of those.

I have my data in Drive D and Drive E backed up on other PCs. My favorites, and Emails in Winnt I would like to salvage.

If I can not build a bootable NT disk, will a complete NT 4 installation destroy the favorite directory in WINNT, or will the reistall leave it alone as the operating system is reinstalled.

Yes, it will destroy it if it is on the drive where NT is installed. If you had a free partition, you could install NT4 in that partition, boot from it, then back up the necessary files from C:, re-install NT4 on C:, then restore those files. But that's not so easy for some things like Favorites and stuff stored in the registry.

If you get Partition Magic, you could create a free partition to do this. It's not a panacea - you will need to re-install all apps, etc. after re-installing NT.

But I think there are some restrictions about where that partition can be placed. Some OS's require that the boot partition start below 1024, meaning it has to be positioned towards the "beginning" of the drive. So you may have to do some shifting around of partitions to do it. Very scary to do if you don't have a good backup.

Where can I find a bootable disk for NT 4

See above.

Another good resource for these types of things is groups.google.com. You can mine the newsgroups for lots of great information. I usually turn there first when I have a problem.

Nope happened about 11 am this morning.

Yep, I replaced the HD, reloaded NT and all the data to drives D and Drive e.

The problem appears to be a hammer, when the office 2000 sp1 met up with a partition greater than 7.8 gig.

I ran the office 2000 for serveral weeks.

Was doing my housing duty cleaning, saving restoring, etc.

thanks for the info.

make sure up get nt4 service pack 6a installed...

Q119467 : How to make an NT boot Disk

This should help you.

Nope happened about 11 am this morning.

Aha, the Y2K3+11 problem! I tried to warn everyone!!