Firstly, what do you wish to run on Windows NT 4.0 that Windows 95 cannot?

To answer your question - yes, you can install both and then dual boot between the two.
Install Windows 95 first and then Windows NT 4.0.
It's preferable to install each Windows on its own separate partition.
Windows NT 4.0 does support FAT (but not FAT32).
During installation of Windows NT 4.0 will it create a boot menu for you.

Both OSes will run basically just single task operations on a 486. I would recommend a Pentium 1 or faster.

I mostly want it around for the novelty, though I can think of one or two programs I want to use (primarily network stuff since almost every other computer on my network is NT) that would run better (or just run, period) on NT. It runs 95 surprisingly well, but yes, a Pentium would be better. If only Pentium overdrives weren't so hard to find! I plan on getting it a 100 MHz 486 DX4. Thanks for the advice!

Personally, if a game runs on both NT 4 and Win95/98 I'd rather run it on NT 4, just for the stability.

If you want totally separate installations which don't require each other to boot (for imaging purposes) i.e. hiding all other partitions during install... you can also use boot managers like Plop, which even runs on modern systems with just an installation to the MBR or there's the old school XOSL which is rock solid too but not quite as elegant.

Maximum number of primary partitions is 4 but there are tricks in those boot managers to use logical partitions as primary to boot more than 4 operating systems from one hard drive.

Well, it would certainly be great if I could get it to install. I have a 2 GB disk, 1 gig is dedicated to 95 (which has just been installed) and the other gig is an extended partition for NT. NT just tells me that it has performed maintenance to my hard disks and that I need to restart Setup. It'll just keep doing this over and over again. The extended partition is formatted as FAT. The primary partition with 95 is set as the "active" partition. What am I doing wrong here?

Edit: For whatever reason, the extended partition's drive letter is D:. I don't know if that's what's causing this or not.

Edit: I've also tried deleting the second partition and just letting the NT setup do its thing on its own, but fdisk tells me that I cannot delete extended partitions while logical drives are present. (In case you haven't guessed by now, I understand absolutely nothing about partitions.)

Yet Another Edit: I managed to delete the extended partition. Let's try now and see where it goes...

Nope. Did nothing. I selected to format the unpartitioned space yet it still gives it the drive letter D: and claims it performed maintenance. I'm about to give up on this, because I'm out of ideas. There's nothing I can do in fdisk, and if the OS can't install to unpartitioned space, then something is clearly not right. I almost want to format the entire drive, install 95, then let NT do the partitioning, but what if it pulls the maintenance crap again?

You may need to install a small fat16 partition first.

I might just format the drive entirely later and start over. I also might just install nothing but NT, but I also want 95 for DOS games and 95 software. Dual-booting is just a dream for now because I haven't got a clue how DOS dual boot partitioning works. I need a step-by-step guide on how to do it, the likes of which don't seem to exist anywhere online unfortunately. If anyone knows of such a guide, or can write one, please let me know.

There's plenty of older sites detailing how to multi boot an a number of OSs. Some even up to four on older systems. It's just a matter of searching for them. Unless you are running the original win95 which was fat16 only with NT you'll always need a fat16 partion to share file and data with Win9x supporting fat32. There are drivers that have read only access to fat32 partitions. Alpha systems needed a small fat16 boot partition to boot strap NT. Worth noting both win9x and NT are capable of loading from fat16 partitions. It's just that you don't have ntfs security.

You need two primary partitions. If you want to just use the built in Windows boot manager / multi-boot process then I think you'll need to make the 2nd partition NTFS.

You can create two primary partitions with something like Acronis Disk Director (or Partition Magic). Make a bootable floppy and put Acronis on it (or your advanced partition software of choice) and use that rather than fdisk. If you're booting from CD, Hiren's Boot CD 10.6 is the last version before they removed all the juicy tools like Acronis.

On multi-boot, I'm not always sure the booting OS will appear as C: which is one of the reasons I prefer using Plop rather than letting Windows do its thing. Say you want to have multiple primary FAT16/32 partitions, having all partitions available to all operating systems or even each OS only able to see its own partition then Plop allows multiple boot entries of your choosing. I also like having a boot entry which resets all partitions to unhidden for making a Ghost image of the whole drive.

Here's how I would do it:
Create a single primary, active partition and install Win95 as normal (you've done this part).

Use the boot disk / Acronis to hide the 1st partition. Create a 2nd primary partition, make the 2nd partition active.
Install Windows NT as normal (it will also think it's a simple single partition install)

Use the boot disk / Acronis to unhide the 1st partition and make it active.
(ideally you have already copied plopinst.com to the same boot disk)
Run the Plop installer (plopinst.com), choose to install to the MBR and reboot.

You're now looking at Plop. Name your partitions accordingly, create some boot entries and configure which partitions are active and hidden/available on each boot entry you create.

Another option is a hard drive caddy and install each OS on it's own drive, swapping them in and out as needed. You could put games on an internal drive (let's say D:) shared by either OS drive. This method has the virtue of doing away with tricky side-by-side OS installs and partitioning, boot managers and the like. Old DOS/Windows caddies aren't hard to come by either.

Probably worth mentioning, if you do manage to source ADDS (Acronis Disk Director Suite), it's likely to be larger than a floppy.
Sorry I didn't think of this but I try my best to avoid floppies so wasn't an issue I've hit before.
If you can only boot from floppy then it makes sense to make both partitions FAT16 and save a copy to the available partition after you have installed Windows each time so it's available when booting from a DOS floppy regardless of which partition is hidden/available.

It has worked! YAY!! Thank you all so much for your help!!

Also, I try to avoid them too. One of the reasons I built a network 😀

Great!
The beauty of totally independent installs is you can later switch out Win95 for Win98 without messing up your ability to boot WinNT... Or even shrink partitions and add another OS.

Well done. What solution did you use in the end? PLOP is great you can boot CDs even on a 486 and some 386 systems.

Thanks 😀 Currently, I'm just hiding/setting partitions in ADDS as needed to switch between NT and 95 (I have a CD with boot disk that allows me to do this) as PLOP currently has troubles running. It says "file for backup not found" which I believe is due to the fact that I'm installing off of a CD. (I'll try a floppy later.) When I use plpinstc (which skips the backup) it does install, but the system hangs at the blinking cursor upon startup. Perhaps I should give it some time, but it was there for 45 seconds with no disk activity, and Ctrl+Alt+Del would not reboot the computer. I'll try it off a floppy soon, fingers crossed! Again, thanks for all the help! I'm really loving NT4 - it's incredibly useful for my network because it can access shares with long filenames 😀

Also, Caluser2000, look at your total number of posts! 486! 🤣

If you don't have any joy, I was using XOSL when Win98 was current. It hasn't changed much between version 1.1.3 and 1.1.5

https://sourceforge.net/projects/xosl/files/x … osl%20%201.1.5/

jesolo wrote:

Windows NT 4.0 does support FAT (but not FAT32).

Sysinternals provides a driver to use FAT32 from NT 4.0. Although it can obviously not be used as system partition.
Likewise, Sysinternals has a driver to access NTFS from Win9x and DOS.

Can confirm the Win9x ntfs driver works fine. Used it years ago.

Not that it matters now as your up and running but for anyone else you can do this without using non MS tools, you will loose the flexibility though as c:\ is the boot drive for both OS's

Preparing the Disk
1) Run Fdisk if it asks about enabling large disk support say no (limits you to Fat16)
2) Create Primary partition and set as active, max size of 2GB is fine
3) Create Extended partition, use all reaming space.
4) Create logical drives, how many and what sizes are up to you, If you want larger then 2GB you'll need to quit fdisk and go back in enabling large disk support

OS Installs
1) Install Win9x to c:\
2) install NT to which ever drive you wish.

Drive letter considerations.
Win9x will ignore any NTFS drives and NT4 will ignore Fat32 drives, this will mess up drive lettering if you don't plan ahead.
its recommended to set up drives in the order of Fat16, then Fat32, NTFS.

In this way Win9x will look something like this
c:\Win9x OS, Fat16
d:\Common, Fat16
e:\Big drive, Fat32
(NTFS drive ignored)

WinNT will look like
c:\Win9x, Fat16
d:\Common, Fat16
e:\NT4, NTFS
(fat32 drive ignored)

I wouldn't bother with NT4 on a 486 honestly due to performance.