Its probably looking for the drivers for the SCSI controller without which the installer will not be able to find the hard drive. They should fit on a floppy and I assume they are still available from the original manufacturers web site.

I haven't installed NT4 in a while but on XP you are prompted to press F6 to provide the appropriate drivers during the very early stages of the installation.

It does something in the nature of that, it asks you to "Press S to provide additional device drivers", unfortunately I do not happen to have those device drivers 😢

They are still available from the Adaptec web site:

https://adaptec.com/en-us/downloads/ms/ms_win … aha-2940uw.html

Thanks for providing the driver!

Only problem is that as soon as I tried to write it to a floppy... the floppy disk corrupted and no longer wants to be written to, I will try to find alternative methods, but I think it may be the end from here.
I'll try and try to get it to work, hopefully I will get somewhere!

You can try resetting the password and seeing what driver NT4 has installed, it should see the adaptec controller: https://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/
I recommend resetting the password to blank.

Okay, that worked great! now I can enjoy a nice Windows NT experience!
You pretty much just have to follow the instructions given on the website, and yes, set the password to blank.
Thanks!

If its new enough to have usb on the system you can load suitable drivers and transfer files via usb stick. Downside is the usb stick needs to be formatted as fat16. There might be read/write drivers for fat32 now if you look hard enough. Formatting the usb stick to NT4s NTFS v4 for will get converted to NTFS v5 if you use the usb stick in system with W2k up and it can't be read by NT 4.0. There may have been drivers to sort this issue out as well it would be worth it if there was.

Fat32 driver for NT4 https://sysinternals.d4rk4.ru/Utilities/Fat32.html

USB on NT4 https://alter.org.ua/docs/win/nt4_usb/

Folk have had success with Dells USB driver as well.

Looks like NT4 with service packs after SP4 support NTFS v5.

Caluser2000 wrote:

If its new enough to have usb on the system you can load suitable drivers and transfer files via usb stick. Downside is the usb stick needs to be formatted as fat16. There might be read/write drivers for fat32 now if you look hard enough. Formatting the usb stick to NT4s NTFS v4 for will get converted to NTFS v5 if you use the usb stick in system with W2k up and it can't be read by NT 4.0. There may have been drivers to sort this issue out as well it would be worth it if there was.

Catch is WinXP and below only support floppy to read the additional drivers this low in setup.

I'd recommend to the OP to get some more disks, a Gotek Floppy drive, or once the NT4 itch is scratch is itched Install Win2k. NT4 is interesting but 2K is more useful and should still run nice on a BX based system

chinny22 wrote:

Catch is WinXP and below only support floppy to read the additional drivers this low in setup.

I'd recommend to the OP to get some more disks, a Gotek Floppy drive, or once the NT4 itch is scratch is itched Install Win2k. NT4 is interesting but 2K is more useful and should still run nice on a BX based system

You can always slipstream/integrate RAID or AHCI drivers into a W2K or XP install CD, nLite makes this easy.

NT4 has its advantages, better compatibility with some 90s games, essentially the Win95 UI which is very lightweight. A fresh NT4 install can be moved to another PC without repercussions, device installation is more like DOS than Win95 or later; handy for later systems which can't run the installer. Once DMA is enabled with DMACHECK.EXE it sings, booting faster than W2K.

BushLin wrote:

chinny22 wrote:

Catch is WinXP and below only support floppy to read the additional drivers this low in setup.

I'd recommend to the OP to get some more disks, a Gotek Floppy drive, or once the NT4 itch is scratch is itched Install Win2k. NT4 is interesting but 2K is more useful and should still run nice on a BX based system

You can always slipstream/integrate RAID or AHCI drivers into a W2K or XP install CD, nLite makes this easy.

NT4 has its advantages, better compatibility with some 90s games, essentially the Win95 UI which is very lightweight. A fresh NT4 install can be moved to another PC without repercussions, device installation is more like DOS than Win95 or later; handy for later systems which can't run the installer. Once DMA is enabled with DMACHECK.EXE it sings, booting faster than W2K.

Yep, agree on both, my point was simply having the drivers on USB isn't going to help with a clean install.
Even checked if nlite supported NT4, but it doesn't so didn't mention slipstreaming to try not to stray too far off topic, but as you brought it up 😀 NT4 still supports slipstreaming as well, you'll just have to do it the old fashion way, no gui driven software to guide you though.

And yeh, I actually really like NT4, run it on 2 machines now. But as OP has a BX motherboard I'm assuming something like a P2 300 as a minimum and even that can run 2k.

NT4 was nothing more than NT 3.51 with a new front end. I wonder if you could customize NT 3.51 using registry hacks and later NT 4 files? Could be an interesting exercise.

Never had much luck transferring a NT4 hdds from one system to another without getting a HAL error.

Caluser2000 wrote:

NT4 was nothing more than NT 3.51 with a new front end. I wonder if you could customize NT 3.51 using registry hacks and later NT 4 files? Could be an interesting exercise.

Can you use the same drivers? I've never even seen an NT 3.51 installation, let alone tinkered.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Never had much luck transferring a NT4 hdds from one system to another without getting a HAL error.

Pick the "Standard PC" HAL during install. I use Virtualbox to do the initial install, which also supports the MPC HAL, modern'ish multi-core hardware probably won't though.

On a side note, the Intellipoint drivers will add scroll wheel (EDIT: and presumably back button) support with or without an actual Intellipoint mouse. My go to install for minimum bloat is SP3, IE4.01SP2, Intellipoint 4.12, SP6a, DMACHECK.

BushLin wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

NT4 was nothing more than NT 3.51 with a new front end. I wonder if you could customize NT 3.51 using registry hacks and later NT 4 files? Could be an interesting exercise.

Can you use the same drivers? I've never even seen an NT 3.51 installation, let alone tinkered.

Yip. You can transfer the HPFS driver over from 3.51 to 4 to access OS/2 drives/partitions. There was test win95 shell for NT 3.51 called NewShell before NT4 was released. http://toastytech.com/guis/misc4.html

Could you format the drive and then boot off a DOS floppy with CD-ROM support and run winnt /b

Skips floppy portion of NT install.