Whats GRUB stand for?

GRand Unified Boot loader

I had another thought for getting some programs to work on NT4 which I want to attempt at some point.

What you would do is have a dll containing the missing functions from kernel32, lets call it exkernel32.dll.
A patcher application would modify the target's import tables to point missing functions to exkernel32.dll instead which would hopefully allow it to run.

Basically I want to run Firefox or another secure, modern browser but without manually patching the sources.
Any thoughts on this method?

I know Revolutions Pack 4 did something like that for 98.
What I would like is a way to get past those pesky installers like the Red Alert one which asks for 95 even though it should work fine on NT4 not sure why it complains about a version 4 os when 95 is Windows 4.0 and NT4 is Windows NT 4.0 oh well I'm sure someone else has worked it out.

I've just installed my first NT4 ever, and I'm simply amazed at how fast it installs, how little memory it uses and how snappy it is (even with the CPU fully loaded due to various activities, MP3 playing doesn't stall).

I gave it an A-Trend ATC-1030 mainboard with a P200MMX, the maximum of 128MB for the 430VX chipset, a Matrox Millennium II 8MB PCI video card and some Opti924-based ISA sound card.

Now I have to figure out how to optimize it for daily home use, and to answer a lot of questions... Should I go for a P233MMX or for a K6-233? What's the recommended Office version (97, 2000 or XP)? What's are the latest Acroread or Winamp versions available? Why was an 8+ GB partition too big to format as NTFS? And probably many more to come...

K6-233 its faster at Integer
Office 2000
Acroreader 7
go for Winamp 2.91 or similar
8.4 GB is only a installer limitation for the first boot (installer boots up NT kernel).
The usual 120 GB should be enough for a K6-233 system (use SP6a).

Nt4 uses fat16, not ntfs. Thus the max partition size of 2.1 gb.

NT4 can use either FAT16 or NTFS.

actually no nt4 can have fat16 partitions >2.1GB just fine although not a good idea cause it becomes inaccessable to DOS I believe but you can easily have an almost 4GB partition in FAT16 in NT4

Is there any option for Yahoo messenging on WinNT4 in our modern times? The latest installable ymsg version (7 I think) won't connect...

Miranda should work
http://www.miranda-im.org/about/

Toasty Tech also reports that you can persuade NT 4 to use FAT32, provided you use the Windows 2000 bootloader.

While his use of FastFat32 works for read/writes to FAT32 drives, I found that I was no longer able to read regular FAT partitions. For example, my test system (IBM 5x86c-133) is such that,

C: Win98SE (FAT)
D: WinNT 4.0 (FAT)
E: Win2000 (FAT)
F: Temp (FAT32)

Each partition is 2 GB and I'm using the W2K bootloader. After replacing the two driver files with the FASTFAT32 files, I was no longer able to access C, nor E, while running WinNT4. It may be that FastFat32 is designed for a service pack before 6?

I find that using the read/write (full version) edition of Fat32.sys from winternals was the way to go. I can now read and write to my FAT32 Temp drive. I don't yet have the balls to convert any of the other partitions to FAT32. The winternals (like sysinternals) filename is nt4fat32.zip if anyone is looking.

Does Windows NT 4 need to be installed on the first partition of the first hard drive (like win9x) or can I just install it alongside DOS on a secondary harddrive (so the root directory is D:\, keeping DOS as the primary OS on C:\) ?

Yes, you can install it on D:, and when DOS is already installed it will add it as option in the boot loader.

Seems that doesn't work when your C: partition is FAT32... 🙁

it may work if you use win2k's or newer NTOSLDR
but that still doesn't mean NT4 can read the FAT32 partition

I tried with 2K's and XP's NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM, but it complained that NTOSKRNL.EXE is the wrong version. So now I just installed Windows 2000 completely. Too bad it isn't as fast as NT4 🙁

jwt27 wrote:

I tried with 2K's and XP's NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM

If I'm not mistaken, what matters in this case is the contents of the boot sector itself.

By the way, are you talking about a second hard drive here, or a second partition? If it's a partition, then naturally it should probably be a primary partition, and there might be some limitation within NT4 that comes into play if your C partition is larger than 8.4 GB.

I wanted to partition my hard drives like this:
Drive 0, Partition 0: Primary 6.4GB FAT32 for DOS + games
Drive 1, Partition 0: Primary 2.0GB FAT16 for Windows NT
Drive 1, Partition 1: Extended 18.0GB FAT32 for games, programs, data, etc.

The Windows NT installer didn't recognize the first drive's FAT32 partition of course, so it refused to install at first. I worked around this by grabbing a random harddrive from the huge pile of parts and formatting it with a 100MB FAT16 partition, as a 'fake' C: drive. Then I installed NT4 on the second drive.
The boot sector Windows NT installed on the C: drive didn't do anything, it just hung on a black screen. But it did boot with Smart Boot Manager on a floppy (after I copied NTLDR, BOOT.INI, etc to the D: drive). So I thought it might just work.
When I put the 6.4GB disk back in it crashed with a 'system disk error'. Then I tried the 2K and XP NTLDRs and got that NTOSKRNL error.

Then I installed Win2K, and again the boot sector didn't do anything at all, it would only boot with the SMB floppy. So I downloaded GRUB4DOS, reinstalled the FreeDOS boot sector on C:, and added these two lines to config.sys:

1MENU 3 - Windows 2000
23?DEVICE=C:\GRUB\GRUB.EXE --config-file="root (hd0,0);chainloader /ntldr"

And now I can finally play Unreal with 15 fps on a Pentium 2 with Voodoo3 😀