I need help recovering my Windows NT 4 system

[johnblood]

Hi,

I have an old NT4 server with mirrored SCSI drives. I got a message that the mirroring had failed. I accidentally destroyed the boot partition on one of the drives while trying to fix it. The drive that will boot is old and out of date. I do have a series of up-to-date tape backup. (The booting drive does not have drivers for the tape drive and I'm having trouble finding drivers for it.) Is it possible to fix the boot partition on the up-to-date drive? If not, how would you recommend I recover the system because it is critical for my business?

Thanks

[Tripredacus]

Let us understand this computer. Is it just the OS+data on a 2 disk mirror and no other disks in the system? The mirror is broken, meaning one disk is ok and the other is bad? A backup exists but you can't find drivers for the tape controller?

First thing is to make a disk image of the working disk.

Usually in a mirror, you don't need to fiddle with the bad disk. You replace it and rebuild the array. If there is some other type of setup you should post those details.

Also put what tape drive it is you can't find drivers for.

[johnblood]

1 hour ago, Tripredacus said:

Is it just the OS+data on a 2 disk mirror and no other disks in the system?

Yes.

2 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

The mirror is broken, meaning one disk is ok and the other is bad?

I'm not 100% sure. I ran chkdsk on the main drive and it came back a-Okay, but I did not run it on the bad drive. Just to be clear the good drive will not boot, Windows say that it does not seen a bootable device. The out-of-date (and possibly bad drive) boots into Windows NT 4 without issue.

 

2 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

A backup exists but you can't find drivers for the tape controller?

That is correct, The page exists on HPE's website (https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-lpg51258), but the file no longer exists. I have an HP StorageWorks DAT 40 SCSI tape drive.

 

2 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

First thing is to make a disk image of the working disk.

How would I do that? I'd done it on Windows 7 and such, but never on NT 4.0.

[Tripredacus]

Some leads on drivers...

Software: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tape/

Possible softpaq ID: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp23501-24000/sp23518.txt

move up on dir on that to get the exe.

[jaclaz]

On 9/23/2019 at 5:54 PM, johnblood said:

How would I do that? I'd done it on Windows 7 and such, but never on NT 4.0.

dsfo (part of the dsfok toolkit) should be working just fine on NT:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/index.html

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/dsfok.zip

The point might be more about which disk you have available (and accessible from NT) to store the image, you need a disk drive bigger than the one you want to image and (of course it depends on the specific setup) NT might have issues in accessing this larger disk (and again this might depend on SP level, actual hardware and what not).

jaclaz 

Edited September 25, 2019 by jaclaz

[johnblood]

On 9/24/2019 at 9:45 AM, Tripredacus said:

Some leads on drivers...

Software: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tape/

Possible softpaq ID: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp23501-24000/sp23518.txt

move up on dir on that to get the exe.

I got the file and it looks like it will work. I've been running into accessing the FTP server. Sometimes it shows up and sometimes it does not. Do they have some kind of limitation on it?

Edited September 27, 2019 by johnblood

[IntMD]

9 hours ago, johnblood said:

I got the file and it look like it will work. I've been running into accessing the FTP server. Sometimes it shows up and sometimes it does not. Do they have some kind of limitation on it?

Try removing the ftp:// prefix, change .txt to .exe

[jaclaz]

10 hours ago, johnblood said:

I got the file and it look like it will work. I've been running into accessing the FTP server. Sometimes it shows up and sometimes it does not. Do they have some kind of limitation on it?

The server/connection seems somehow flaky, I had the same issue (directory listing not showing correctly and needing a refresh), if you got the file, good, otherwuise you may want to try a ftp client (as opposed to a browser).

jaclaz

[johnblood]

On 9/24/2019 at 9:45 AM, Tripredacus said:

Some leads on drivers...

Software: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tape/

Possible softpaq ID: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp23501-24000/sp23518.txt

move up on dir on that to get the exe.

That was the correct driver pack! We reinstalled Windows NT (after several false starts and much web research), were able to install the tape drive and restore the system. However, something still don't work. Hopefully, once I install the networking card and setup networking, everything will work. Thanks for your help.