Few possible things here.
NT4 setup only supports hard drives upto 8GB, you'll need to create the updated Atapi.sys disk
https://archive.org/details/kb197667

Back in the day I simply left the last ~2GB of my 10GB drive unpartitioned keeping me under the limit until NT4 +SP6 was installed at which point you can create a data drive and it'll still be happy.

I'd stick with Win95's fdisk. I never much liked NT's setup partion routine and while fdisk is basic and lacks some of the fancy things 3rd party partition software can do but the advantage of that it doesn't do anything NT won't understand either.

Win95 recognized the full 32GB right?
But remember NT4 only supports Fat16 and NTFS -and of course fdisk doesn't understand NTFS
I always set the primary partition as 2GB Fat16 keeps all the OS's happy when dual booting and ensures compatibility. You can use Fdsik to create teh other partiotions but don't format it as Fat32 otherwise NT wont recognise it

All hope is gone. It doesn't work ... WinNT installation really sucks.
I believe that Compact Flash are incompatible.

NarakuITA wrote on 2022-10-12, 23:00:

All hope is gone. It doesn't work ... WinNT installation really sucks.
I believe that Compact Flash are incompatible.

It's odd. I don't think NT4 cared about a CF card being removable. That only started being a real issue since Win2K.

What brand of CF card did you use? Some consumer grade CF cards use firmware with broken IDE functionalities that can cause issues when used on PCs, but not with their intended use cases (such as cameras).

I have Sandisk CF cards reporting incorrect or even 0MB size in BIOS, and a 64GB one using a hardcoded partition table containing a 32GB unformatted partition with newer Windows (the card itself works fine on other OSes though). On the other hand I also have a Lexar CF causing issues with some software due to its name string being empty, but it otherwise works okay.

Additionally, are you using a CF-IDE adapter? How's its quality? From my experience these adapters can be rather fragile that some CF pins go loose very easily requiring extra care when handling them.

Yes I have an adapter from Germany, with DMA support. I have no idea of the brand.
As for the CFs, I used several brands, Trascend 133x, Trascend industrial, ScanDisk Extreme UDMA7, and two CFs from an unknown brand, Chinese stuff.

LSS10999 wrote on 2022-10-13, 00:51:

NarakuITA wrote on 2022-10-12, 23:00:

All hope is gone. It doesn't work ... WinNT installation really sucks.
I believe that Compact Flash are incompatible.

It's odd. I don't think NT4 cared about a CF card being removable. That only started being a real issue since Win2K.

I'm not sure about that.
When facing a problem with an internal CF to IDE adapter I've replaced this device by a real HDD. This has solved my problem.

NarakuITA wrote on 2022-10-12, 23:00:

All hope is gone. It doesn't work ... WinNT installation really sucks.

If you think this was bad, try to install Windows NT 3. If you happen to have two IDE hard drives in the target system, the installer will attempt to do "maintenance" that never completes, severely corrupt the boot partition or straight-up fail to install.

I managed to install Windows NT 3.51 and NT4 using various SSDs + a cheap PCI to SATA adapter with VIA 6421 chipset. For NT4 there are plenty PCI - IDE/SATA compatible cards. (even some SATA II cards have drivers)

My way of installing Windows NT 3.51/4 is by creating a bootable DOS 2GB FAT16 partition with NT installation files on it. You may need to use lock command in the DOS part of the installation.

Look at the end, I have installed Windows 2000.
WindowsNT is too complicated to install. I've wasted enough time. I thought I could fix the problems, but it doesn't work.
The problem is that when I format in fat16, the program only recognizes me maximum 16MB, out of 32GB. I can't even partition the disk with 2GB!
Thanks for the help!

If anyone is looking for more info I have recently spent a lot of time with NT4 on a CF quad boot setup (FreeDOS/98SE on one 32GB CF and NT4/2000 on a second, using Boot-US for partition hiding).

There are some limitations that I had to overcome. 4 is especially important with CF cards

1) I partition the drive from a Windows 7 boot disk with diskpart. I clean the disk, set it as MBR, create a small (500MB) primary partition and leave the rest unused.
2) NT4 will only install to the drive set as primary in the bios (a slight lie, I can disable the first CF and the secondary becomes the only one detected in bios).
3) NT4 can install directly to NTFS, but only version 1.2 as formatted by NT4 (so no formatting with 2000 or later, or gparted etc)
4) The partition size limit during install for FAT16/NTFS with SP1 media is *not* 8GB, it is based on C/H/S values so may be considerably less (https://www.c-ad.bnl.gov/kinyip/windows/confi … oot_device.html)

For my 32GB industrial card the C/H/S values reported are 62041/16/63, this means all of NT4 must be installed in a partition below 500MB (1024 * 16 * 63, with 512 bytes per sector). If any files end up above this then install/boot will fail.

5) Once installed within the 500MB partition I can boot successfully. Once booted I install SP6a. After SP6a has installed (before reboot) I overwrite ntldr and ntdetect.com with the XP versions. This means I now have an install that supports larger drives.

6) I take an image of the drive with dos version of ghost from ghost solution suite 1.1
7) I restore the image over the drive and ghost expands the NTFS volume to fill the drive

This leaves me with a 16GB partition with a patched version of NT4 and XPs boot loader that allows it to boot with files above the C/H/S bios limit. I've not found any more modern tools that can cope with imaging NTFS 1.2. NT once updated to SP6 can run with a NTFS 3.0 (Windows 2000) partition, but chkdsk etc no longer work without hotfixes.

Edit: Oh and the CF must be set as a fixed disk, not removable.

Hmmm, so some CF cards report a CHS value that further limits them to the 504MB barrier?

Don't know if it's possible to try with the UniATA driver somehow. AFAIK if UniATA works in your case, then you will not be limited by the CHS barriers, but you're still limited by the filesystems it could support (FAT16, NTFS).

Windows 2000's NTLDR will work with NT 3.51 and 4.0 and you can remove the CHS restriction for booting with it, but it's good to hear that Windows XP's NTLDR works with NT4 with SP6a.

LSS10999 wrote on 2022-10-19, 08:59:

Hmmm, so some CF cards report a CHS value that further limits them to the 504MB barrier?

My CF card geometry reporting 16 heads means that 8GB limit is only going to be 1/16th of the maximum 8GB without LBA, so yes 504MB with this card.

I used the uniata driver during install but it is no different to the sp4 atapi driver, the NT4 installer cannot work outside the C/H/S limit even if the drivers/fs support higher amounts once fully patched.

My board is a Tyan 1832D which mostly supports LBA (up to 33.8GB limit), but appears to have a few compatibility issues. In FreeDOS I can only see 8GB of the CF with LBA enabled, and 32GB with LBA disabled in the bios! LBA enabled partitioning with linux/later windows is fine though and FreeDOS is happy to use the layout and reports the correct capacity.

Ricimer wrote on 2022-10-20, 18:42:

My CF card geometry reporting 16 heads means that 8GB limit is only going to be 1/16th of the maximum 8GB without LBA, so yes 5 […]
Show full quote

LSS10999 wrote on 2022-10-19, 08:59:

Hmmm, so some CF cards report a CHS value that further limits them to the 504MB barrier?

My CF card geometry reporting 16 heads means that 8GB limit is only going to be 1/16th of the maximum 8GB without LBA, so yes 504MB with this card.

I used the uniata driver during install but it is no different to the sp4 atapi driver, the NT4 installer cannot work outside the C/H/S limit even if the drivers/fs support higher amounts once fully patched.

My board is a Tyan 1832D which mostly supports LBA (up to 33.8GB limit), but appears to have a few compatibility issues. In FreeDOS I can only see 8GB of the CF with LBA enabled, and 32GB with LBA disabled in the bios! LBA enabled partitioning with linux/later windows is fine though and FreeDOS is happy to use the layout and reports the correct capacity.

Some very old motherboards either do not have LBA or have flawed LBA that don't really work. You could be held back by multiple barriers: 504MB, 2GB, 8GB, etc.

Did you try installing with the CF card behind an overlay such as Ontrack's "Dynamic Disk Overlay"? If configured correctly that thing could help with booting and using very large hard disks well above those barriers.

No, I haven't done this test. Just some.
In the end, as already mentioned, I gave up, after several attempts. I now use Windows 2000. I have to say that it works very well and I am fine!