It would make sense if NT is hard-coded to read the next bootloader stage from partition #1, and if it can't read FAT32 at that stage, that could be why you remember it not working. Using the Win2k version sounds like a good solution, if that is capable of loading NT, as it would have FAT32 support.

Otherwise, the partition number is the order in the partition table. Everything uses this and pretty much ignores the other fields (apart from the partition type) so nothing will notice the partitions appear out of order (with the possible exception of disk partitioning utilities, which may complain or may work just fine.) It's usually only a problem when modifying the partition table and a program assumes the disk ends after the last partition, not realising there's more data following and it was actually listed earlier in the partition table.

feipoa wrote:

Responding to some of the comments posed above: […]
Show full quote

Responding to some of the comments posed above:

- PLOP did not allow the Win95c partition to boot.

- My Asus PVI-486SP3 (1 VLB + 3 PCI) does not recognise the HDD when using the Adaptec AHA-2842A VLB SCSI card. My PC Chips M919 (1 VLB + 3 PCI) also does not recognise the HDD when using the VLB SCSI card. So I can not determine if the issue is due to a motherboard BIOS limitation or strictly due to the VLB SCSI card's BIOS.

- It looks like I may need to setup this HDD another way. Does anyone know which files Win95c needs just to startup? I'd like to create a small Win95c boot partition, perhaps 100 MB if possible.

- PLOP will not help you to fix the 4GB hdd barrier for SCSI disks, because in these cases INT13 data to patch ins't in the system bios data area, but in the SCSI card BIOS data area. PLOP can only patch system bios data area, and its INT13 extension driver will only work with IDE disks. The same applies for any overlay disk driver.

- Win95 setup allows to installl windows in a different partition from C. If you let setup take care about it, it will create necessary files in C: and the rest, including program files and windows folder will be installed in the OS partition.

- NT setup can do the same as Win95.

- You want to install Win95 in the first OS partition, intro the 4GB barrier. That's because NT allows a little trick to bypass the barrier that Win95 doesn't allow.

- Trick is copying NT4 SCSI port driver to the small boot partition where NTLDR resides, with NTBOOTDD.SYS name, and changing nomeclature in boot.ini as follows: from multi( 0 )disk( X )rdisk( Y )partition( Z ), to scsi( 0 )disk( X )rdisk( Y )partition( Z ). This will allow NTLDR to use your card 32bit full driver, and will bypass any card bios barrier. Use always the most updated version of your port driver

More info about this here.

In the end, your layout will end like this: [Primary, Boot Partition, 100 to 300 MB, depending in your needs] [Extended Partition, Rest of Disk (Win95 Logical Volume, Intro the 4GB Barrier)| 4GB Barrier | (NT4 Logical Volume)]

Boot partition needs to be created with HBA tools from DOS in the destination SCSI HBA. The rest can be created from inside any OS with tools like DIskpart (use XP/2003 server version), or partition magic inside windows, to access the full disk using the full 32bit port driver.

hyoenmadan wrote:

In the end, your layout will end like this: [Primary, Boot Partition, 100 to 300 MB, depending in your needs] [Extended Partition, Rest of Disk (Win95 Logical Volume, Intro the 4GB Barrier)| 4GB Barrier | (NT4 Logical Volume)]

Is your scheme recessary to restrict the Win95c partition to 4 GB? I am shooting for something closer to 8 GB. The way the HDD is setup now, I am already using 5 GB of the HDD.

alexanrs wrote:

I believe you need at least NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM. You might like reading this page.

That guy from bearwindows is really into Windows NT! I think I will try this and simply swap the order of my partitions, with
C:\ = Win95c FAT32 @ 7800 MB
D:\ = WinNT4 NTFS @ 7800 MB w\W2K boot loader

alexanrs wrote:

I believe you need at least NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM. You might like reading this page.

Bootfont.bin.

Gamecollector wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

I believe you need at least NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM. You might like reading this page.

Bootfont.bin.

I do not understand what you are implying. bootfont.bin = Russian installer font. Does it mean something else to you?

This is where I'm at:

1) Created 7797 MB FAT32, C:\
2) Installed Win95c on the first stretch of real-estate at C:\
3) Used Partition Magic to hide Win95c partition
4) Used Partition Magic to create a FAT partition for WINNT4. The max it let me created was 235 MB. I figured I could adjust that in a 2940U2W SCSI controller after NT4 is installed.
5) Installed NT4 to the 235 MB partition and asked it to convert it to NTFS during the setup process, which actually occurs a reboot or two later.
6) Upon the first NT4 reboot, the system at POST checks dirve A:\ for bootable media, then goes to check C:\, at which point nothing happens. No error message, just the POST screen.
7) I moved this HDD into another system so that I could copy over W2K's NTDETECT.COM and ntldr.
8.) Put the HDD back into my 486 with Adaptec 2842A and tried to boot. The result was the same - nothing happens at boot time. No error, no nothing. I suspect this is because NT4 is trying to write to the FAT32 partition and cannot.

EDIT:
9) Using scsi instead of multi in boot.ini did not help.
10) Converting the Win95c partition to a 2 GB FAT partition did not help.
11) Reinstalling NT4 when the Win95c partition was formated as FAT did not help.

I'd make the following:

1) Install Win95c exactly how you did it
2) Create the 235MB FAT partition as you did (or a larger one if you reduce Win95c's partition size)
3) Copy NT4's installation files and update it using the procedure on the BEARWINDOWS site
4) Replace the FAT driver with the FAT32-enabled one
5) Try to slipstream your SCSI driver. This would sidestep the 8GB thing altogether. Or load it using a floppy when setup asks you to.
5) THEN try to install

Alternatively, you could do the following:
1) Create a small (sub 100MB is fine) FAT16 partition, a FAT32 partition for Win95 and a FAT16 partition for Windows NT (all primary). The FAT32 partition should remain below the 8GB barrier, but for the NT one its not that important.
2) Hide the FAT16 partitions, flag the FAT32 one as active, install Win95 on the FAT32 one
3) Unhide the FAT16 partitions, flag the small one as active
4) install WinNT on the second FAT16 partition, converting it to NTFS, but be sure to load the SCSI driver or else it will fail when going above 8GB
5) Hopefully it will install the bootloader in the small FAT16 partition. And hopefully it will have the SCSI driver there as NT's boot device (instead of relying on BIOS)
6) See if you can boot into Win95 through NT's bootloader. If not, just install a more advanced boot manager to hide the other partitions before booting into Windows 95.

I was trying to avoid the BEARWINDOWS procedure because it seemed overly involved. If I knew it would work, I would be more inclined to put in the effort.

What do you mean by "Replace the FAT driver with the FAT32-enabled one"? You mean install the program FAT32 for NT?

I'm going to try one other thing now...

In the bearwindows site there is one FASTFAT replacement driver that is FAT32 enabled. Since it replaces the default NT drivers it doesn't need any special registry settings and you can just replace the original fimes in the installation media.

What I tried to do just now did not work. I am keeping the HDD under the 8 GB limit (255 head or less).

I wanted to make a clone of my original configuration (noted in first post),

C: NT4 @ 7797 Megabytes - NTFS
D: W95c @ 7805 Megabytes - FAT32

but instead, keep the total combined size under 8032 MB, so, I made a Norton Ghost copy but used these sizes,

C: NT4 @ 4016 Megabytes - NTFS
D: W95c @ 4016 Megabytes - FAT32

NT4 booted fine. Win95c still gives a Disk I/O error. Perhaps this SCSI controller has trouble reading boot sector images? PLOP doesn't work either - Disk I/O Error. I wonder if there is a SCSI BIOS limitation which only allows for booting from the primary HDD?

I am beginning to think that I cannot use disk cloning for my setup because the extended BIOS translation on the 2940U2W is different than on the 2842A. Let me first try a manual install of NT4 and W95c using the slow approach with the CD-ROM installation media and confirm that I can dual boot NT4 and W95c with two 4 GB partitions.

Well, if that works you might as well just use Partition Magic or something and resize the partitions and be done with it.

The issue did seem to be related to how the 2940U2W was handling the Extended BIOS Translation compared to the 2842A.

I now have,

C: NT4 @ 4016 Megabytes - NTFS
D: W95c @ 4008 Megabytes - FAT32,

and am using the NT4 boot loader. I asked fdisk to use the max space available, and it sized it to 4008 MB.

When I run Partition Magic 8.0 in DOS or Win95c, it does not show that there is any unallocated space to extend the HDDs into. This implies to me that Partition Magic is using the SCSI BIOS to determine HDD size. How do I get Partition Magic (DOS/Win95c) to see the unallocated space?

Edit: I used Partition Magic 8.0 from within WinNT4.0 to resize the Win95c partition to 8 GB, rebooted, and received Disk I/O Error at boot.

When does this Disk I/O error occur? When booting NT4, Win95 or just the bootloader?

Only after I select Windows 95 from the boot loader menu, do I get Disk I/O Error (that is, after I tried to enlarge the partition). NT4 boots fine.

I'd try to shrink the partition to 7gb and see if that fixes it.
Btw, are you using 2k's boot loader?

Yes, I am using 2K's boot loader.

It is unlikely 7 GB would fix it as this Win95c partition starts from 4 GB onwards, so it is well passed the 8 GB barrier.

Oooh... that is the issue. A good chunck of Win95's boot process happens in DOS, before the SCSI drivers are loaded. Windows NT, on the other hand, is fine as long as the bootloader itself can load the SCSI drivers. If you can get Win95 installed first (below the 8GB barrier), then Windows NT installed on the second partition with Win2k/XP's bootloader on the Win95 partition, all should be well.

Due to its reliance on DOS, put your Win 9x partition entirely below the 8.4GB limit. Until the machine enters protected mode, Win 9x uses the Int 13h services to load files. Since you can't guarantee that all of the needed system files for Windows will remain below the 8.4GB barrier, you have to limit the partition size. NT has no problems booting/running from the 2nd partition on the drive as long as the bootloader and any required disk controller drivers are under the 8.4GB limit.

Does EZ-Drive or OnTrack Disk Manager support SCSI cards? They may be worth a shot to get around the BIOS limitation on the cards.

NJRoadfan wrote:

NT has no problems booting/running from the 2nd partition on the drive as long as the bootloader and any required disk controller drivers are under the 8.4GB limit.

I found this not to be the case with my installation.

I tried the following, and it failed.

C:\ = Win95c - FAT16 - 2047 MB
Unallocated space - 5500 MB
D:\ = WinNT4 - FAT16 - 300 MB
Unallocated space

After installing Windows NT4, the system will not reboot after the first round or reboots. It just sits there after POST.

I tried this configuraiton with, both, C:\ as the active partition and with C:\ as a hidden partition and D: active. The result is the same - hangs after POST. If I cannot figure this out, I will have to settle for the, both, the Win95c and NT4 partitions at 4 GB each, with NT4 installed first. I've noticed that I can still create 3rd and 4th partitions which are accessible by Win95c, provided that NT4 creates them. In which case, I'll be suck with 4 partitions and loose out on the cleanliness of 2 large partitions.