Q: I have two 486 systems running Windows NT 3.51; one system has a CD-ROM drive and one doesn't. When the system without a CD-ROM drive crashed, I connected the CD-ROM drive to load NT. After I installed it and Service Pack 4, I shut down the PC and removed the IDE CD-ROM drive. After going through the initial menu screens, I got the blue screen of death:
1 system processor [31932 Kilobit (Kb) Memory]
***STOP: (0xFF022BB0, 0xC0000034, 0x0,0x0)
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
CPUID: GenuineIntel 4.3.5 irql: 0 sysver 0xf0000421
If I reconnect the CD-ROM drive, everything boots. How can I properly remove the CD-ROM drive?
In Control Panel, open SCSI Adapters and remove IDE CD-ROM ATAPI 1.2. Now open the Devices applet, find the atapi device, and change its startup type from BOOT to Disabled. If you don't see any SCSI devices attached, select the scsidisk device and change its startup type from BOOT to Disabled.
Select the atdisk device and change its startup type from Disabled to BOOT. Make sure the atdisk.sys file is in your %systemroot%\winnt\system32\drivers subdirectory. If not, get this file from your floppy or CD-ROM drive.
Shut down, and reboot. Obviously, to make any changes, you have to boot into NT by temporarily reattaching the CD-ROM drive.
If I'm running NT 4.0 beta 2, how do I upgrade to the final version?
Open regedt32.exe, and go to hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\winnt\currentversion. Change the CurrentVersion value from 4.0 to 3.51 (or earlier), as you see in Screen 1. Then rerun winnt32.exe /b (or use the install floppies) from the \i386 directory of your NT 4.0 upgrade CD-ROM, and Setup will think your NT 4.0 RC2 installation is an NT 3.51 installation.
I just installed NT 4.0. One reason I trashed Windows 95 (best thing I ever did) was unreliable floppy performance: I even replaced the floppy drive to no avail. The floppy drive works flawlessly with NT 3.51. But with NT 4.0, when I try to install from the floppy, the installation hangs on specific files and never completes. This problem is driving me nuts. I never had this trouble with NT 3.51. Have you heard of problems with NT 4.0 and floppy drives?
Although what you are seeing is not the norm, it does happen. I have an Asus P55T2P4 motherboard with a 512KB cache, a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of EDO RAM, and an UltraWide SCSI bus. The system is very fast. I can't perform a floppy-based installation because ntfs.sys won't load properly. However, I can copy the files to the hard disk and install them from there without problems. To be honest, I don't know why your system has such problems. I don't suspect that NT 4.0 is having trouble with your floppy drive as much as I suspect it has something to with the chipset on the motherboard.
When I try upgrading to NT 4.0, the installation freezes early in the installation process. What are some possible causes?
A system that locks up early in the install phase is probably hanging on the ntdetect phase. Remove any NICs and unnecessary SCSI cards. (In this case, the problem was an NCR 53c810 card that would not boot with the new Symbios driver. Installing the NT 3.51 driver after installation to the EIDE drives worked perfectly.)
What if the appropriate SCSI fails to load and you have SCSI hard disks? The only way I know to install is to copy the \i386 directory to your local hard drive, replace the new driver with the old driver, and then upgrade. (You might need to install a second version of NT to copy the files, and then run winnt /b.)
Q: I just applied the NT 4.0 upgrade, and now I don't have audio. How can I fix this problem?
Run regedt32.exe and go to hkey_current_user\control panel\
sound\beep. My guess is that the value for this key got changed to No. Change it to Yes. Screen 2 shows this setting.
What are command extensions, and how can I use and control them in NT 4.0?
Take the command mkdir as an example. This command makes a directory, and the syntax is
MKDIR [drive:]path
MD [drive:]path
If you enable command extensions, mkdir creates necessary intermediate directories in the path, if needed. For example, assuming \a does not exist,
MKDIR \a\b\c\d
is the same as:
MKDIR \a
CHDIR \a
MKDIR \b
CHDIR \b
MKDIR \c
CHDIR \c
MKDIR \d