Is NT4 still a viable OS?

[sharkeeper]

It's the F5 key.

Cheers!

 

[joohang]

hungrypete,

NT can be installed on a logical partition, as long as it's FAT16 or NTFS.

 

[thegreatjeff]

WINDOWS 2000 RULES! Reliable, fast (faster than Win98 & ME in my tests) and cool-looking...i.e. fading menus, etc... 😛

 

[borealiss]

i think there's a catch though. your boot up partition has to be fat16 because even though nt can reside in a ntfs partition, it has to be able to read the boot sector of the bootup device, and if you want win9x to be compatible as well, the primary partition has to be fat16.

 

[joohang]

borealiss,

That is correct. The first primary partition (or the boot partition) must be FAT16 for NT4.

 

[Sunner]

No, it can be NTFS.
Just specify it as NTFS during the setup, and a FAT16 partition will be created, and later during the install before the filecopying begins, it will be converted to NTFS.
If you dont want to, you dont have to touch FAT16 with NT.

 

[mcbiff]

Also, I'm pretty sure NT4 must be installed somewhere within the first 8Gbs of your HDD for it to work.

 

[joohang]

Sunner,

I was referring to the case of dual booting with win9x.

 

[Noriaki]

mcbiff:
Any boot partition has to be within the first 1024 cylinders for any OS (I've heard somewhere than a new version of LiLO might overcome this for linux...but in gerenal that's true of any OS) and that's roughly 8GB on most newer hard drives.


Who says WinNT's boot partition has to FAT16? Win9x will always install some files to the first FAT partition it can see so if you want to share Win9x and WinNT you need a FAT16 partition (since winNT4 can't see FAT32 drives AFAIK) but if you are going NT4 alone you can convert all your drives to NTFS.

brian_riendeau: wow...even if you disable ACPI in the BIOS and do a clean Win2k install with the Standard PC (non-ACPI) HAL you still get ACPI problems...that's a little weird 😉

 

[mcbiff]

Noriaki: So that's what it was. Thanks for setting me straight. 🙂

 

[wyvrn]

Do not feel like buying another motherboard, so NT4 it is

Well in that case you are moving backwards and not forwards. If you plan on getting Whistler, then you might run the same chance of it happening. Might as well upgrade that board and get it over with.

 

[joohang]

wyvrn,

But it is also pretty smart of him to live with NT4 for a while and upgrade some time next year.