Finally found some free time to setup the software side of my RETRO-W95 build which dual boots Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT 4.0 SP6a on a 120GB FAT32 HDD. The main reasons for dual boot is to always have a more stable NT4 for when something goes wrong with W95, easier to backup/restore with a batch + WinRAR, and NT4 has a special place in my memories since I used it for many years at the University.

I decided to start from scratch: installed both Windows on FAT32 and created the 1st backup (CLEAN), then installed most of the patches/updates mentioned in hpcfactor and created the 2nd backup (PATCHES), then installed the drivers. Everything went peachy with W95 which now has its 3rd backup (DRIVERS), but NT4 had to throw a wrench in a otherwise smooth process: after enabling PNP with Drvlib\Pnpisa\i386\Pnpisa.inf, Windows correctly detects the sound card as Terratec Gold 16/96, but selecting OEMSETUP.INF from the extracted Gold1696_Drv_nt4.exe finds no drivers, outputting the error "the specified location does not contain information about your hardware". The same seems to happen with the Adaptec AVA-2904 SCSI PCI card and OEMSETUP.INF from 7800wnt.exe, but that one at least has default NT drivers to fallback on.

Going back to the 1st backup (CLEAN) and installing Pnpisa.inf there makes no difference, so the problem is not with the patches/updates I installed. Removing all PCI cards except for the ISA sound card also makes no difference. Did I miss something?

EDIT: tried with Phil's NT4 drivers for ES1868/ES1868F (185xnt40.zip) and it also didn't work. The OEMSETUP.INF content seems rather too simple with just 6 lines of text, maybe I don't know how NT4 inf files are supposed to look? I also tried with "1868w95.zip" which I got for somewhere else and also contains a OEMSETUP.INF, it did install but nothing worked and rebooting just asked for the drivers again. At least the OEMSETUP.INF looked like a "normal" inf with several pages of lines instead of just 6...