Can connecting a Win-NT4 drive as a slave to a Win-10 system mess it up?

[Nomen]

I've sort of known that if you connect an NTFS drive as a slave to another system running a more recent NTFS version (say, connecting an NT4 drive to a Win-XP system) that "things happen to it" such that you might not be able to run the NT4's native drive-fixing tools (scandisk or defrag) any more.  But I've never NOT been able to put said drive back into its original box and it fails to boot.

So here's the situation:  I've used Ghost booted from a floppy many times to clone NT4 and XP drives (usually 80 gb IDE drives) to make backup copies of them.  I have a couple of NT4 boxes that are for mail and web servers.

I've decided it's time to clone the NT4 web server.  So I whip out the Ghost floppy, do the clone, but Ghost says there's a problem (I think a logical problem, not a bad sector).  I try different Ghost startup options, but can't get past this.

I have Macrium reflect installed on a win-10 PC, I've used it to clone itself to another drive and I'm surprised but yes it works, and the clone boots.

Ok, so I connect the NT4 drive (80 gb) to the win-10 PC and I connect a blank SATA drive (128 gb) also and have a look at Windows Disk Manager and I can see them so everything looks ok there.  I fire up Macrium, select the source and destination, select sector-by-sector, and start the clone.  Half an hour later, it's done.  I put the clone drive in the NT4 box and try to boot it up.  This is what I get:

Disk I/O Error: Status = 00000001

NTDETECT V4.0 Checking hardware ...

Disk I/O Error: Status = 00000001

NTDETECT failed

Great.  WTF.

Ok, I take the clone drive out, plug the original drive back in, and GET THE SAME F ing message.

Why did just pluging my NT4 drive into the Win-10 box to clone it f it up?

Could it be something as simple as Win-10 set a flag on the NT4 drive to disable it's boot status?  IE - make it non-bootable?

Is there a rule that says any NT-based OS can't stand having more than 1 bootable drive/partition on a system and if it sees it it takes action?

Or has something deeper happened to the NT4 drive that's going to require major surgery to correct?

The NT4 drive has 2 logical partitions or volumes (C drive and D drive).  When I have the cloned NT4 drive in the win-10 box, I can see all the files on the "D" drive, but it tells me I (or "it") doesn't have permission to see the C drive files.  So I "took ownership" of the C drive and a few minutes later after all the file-scrolling was done I had access to the C drive and all the files are there, root directory, etc, so all the files are there.

Is there any drive utility I can put on a bootable floppy and fix the original drive, or make the clone boot on the original box?  Or do I have to drag out the original NT4 CD and start putzing with this?

 

Edited November 13, 2023 by Nomen

[Nomen]

If I connected this drive to another running NT4 (or win-2k) system, what commands or utility can I run that might restore the boot-ability of the drive?

I also read about some sort of 7.8 gb volume or partition size quirk that might or will mess up NT4's bootability if some files get moved beyond that point on the boot volume.  ?

 

Edited November 13, 2023 by Nomen

[R1600]

https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/winnt4.htm

You should read this article. I think there are some hints that will help you.

[Nomen]

Yea there's a lot of good info there, primarily if you are setting up a new NT4 install from scratch, and some info about connecting newer version OS drives to NT4 and NTFS tool compatibility.  But nothing really about what happens when an NT4 NTFS drive is attached to a newer running system (XP, 7, 10, etc) - something you might want to do for file transfer, file system checking / repair, backup or cloning reasons.

This incident happened yesterday, I'll be back at it today at some point.

[R1600]

Your nt4 drive might be formatted as ntfs v1.2 . Windows XP+ convert ntfs v1.x drive to ntfs v3.1 automatically. Ntfs v3.1 is supported in nt4 sp4+. If your nt4 installation is under sp4, that might be problem.

[Nomen]

The 2 NT4 servers I have running are both SP6.  Their initial creation was circa 1998 probably, and through cloning over time have migrated to larger drives.  A few months ago I had used Ghost 3 (?) on floppy to clone one of them from an 80 gb drive to a 128 gb sata SSD, worked fine, booted fine, etc.

Today I took a number of old backup drives and tried them in a couple different motherboards while booting an actual original NT 4 server installation CD.  Upon booting I selected r (for recovery or repair) and every time I'm told that no NT4 installation can be found.   The repair thing also asks if you have an emergency recovery disk (which I never made).

All of these old backup drives can actually boot NT4. They were 6, 40 and 80 gb size drives, all IDE. The motherboards were circa 1998 to 2000, P2 or P3 (in a socket card). When the NT4 CD boots up, it loads a bunch of drivers, then at one point it detects mass storage devices and it does detect the ATAPI / CD / IDE interface and on one board it detected the SCSI (yes SCSI, not sata) hardware interface that was on this board (it was a Gigabyte BX440 board).   For all drives except the 6 GB drive it threw up a warning/message screen about drives with more than 1000 cylinders (I think it was cylinders) as possibly being an incompatible geometry. 

For a while today I was thinking I needed to give the NT cd a floppy with an appropriate IDE storage driver on it when it asks for additional drivers, and I looked through a lot of different motherboard driver CD's I have that are dated 1996 - 2004 and I looked on the web and I can find NO hint that there is such an animal. 

The boot partition or volume on the 6 gb drive I had was 2 gb, so no possibility there of incompatible size. So why the NT4 installation CD totally rejects these drives as having working installations of NT4, who knows.   It is likely that at one point or many points in the past these drives were connected to XP boxes to have defragging and virus scanning done to them.  The 80 gb drive that started this problem has 2 partitions or volumes, both NTFS, the first is 12 gb, the second is the rest of the drive (64 gb I think).  But it doesn't matter, if the installation CD can't find an NT4 installation on 2 gb partition on a 6 gb drive then wtf.

I also tried the Repair option from a bootable XP-SP3 CD - this time XP does see the NT installation but it asks for the admin password, which I know what it is and I gave it, but XP said wrong password. Go figure. I'm going to get this box up and running from an old(er) backup drive and then copy the current files that were in use from this pooched drive over. Has anyone ever had any luck restoring boot-ability to an old NT drive using utilities like Kaspersky, Hirens, etc?

 

 

[GrofLuigi]

See this (It's about Win8, but Win10 is the same). Especially the last paragraph(s). I think when Win10 saw that disk(s), it autoconverted them to higher NTFS version (regardless of the possible incompatibilities of early NTFS versions mentioned in this thread).

 

I had the same situation before (but involving XP and Win8/10) and chkdsk /f solved it. But it had to be XP's chkdsk.

 

GL

 

[Nomen]

---------------------
Type “fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <the drive letter of your volume”; example:
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo C:                                                         
You should see output similar to the below.

-If you see the entry “LFS Version” as 2.0, than your volume has been upgraded to the high performance Logfile structure only compatible with Windows 8.

-If you see the entry “LFS Version” as 1.1, than your volume is using a Logfile structure compatible with previous versions of Windows.
----------------------

I'm running Win-7 Ultimate SP1 32-bit and I'm seeing version 3.1 when I run that fsutil command.  Last I checked, 3.1 is numerically higher than 2.0, while 7 is less than 8. Curious.

Regarding the registry value NtfsDisableLfsUpgrade, for one thing I don't see it on this Windows 7 PC I'm using to type this, but if creating that entry and setting it to 1 means don't upgrade mounted NTFS from 1 to 2 then what does it mean when the OS drive is already at 3.1?  Will that result in an immediate downgrade of the running hard drive?  Or does it mean don't change the version when mounting any NTFS volume?

-------------
Close the Registry Editor and perform a system Restart (not Shutdown) to downgrade all mounted NTFS volumes to a log file structure and version number compatible with prior versions of Windows. Upon the next boot of Windows 8, NTFS will no longer upgrade the log file structure and version number to 2.0 if the above key was set to a non-zero value.
--------------

That seems unworkable.  

You want your existing OS drive to maintain what-ever NTFS version level it currently has, AND you don't want any new mounted NTFS drive to be messed with.  Is there a registry entry (for win-10) for that?

[Nomen]

Does this exchange here from 2015:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/windows-10-649860-windows-7-617601-dirty-flag/1520f41d-eb80-490b-b8be-7acd9d53c031?page=1

mirror what I'm seeing?

Except it deals with Win-10 corrupting win-7 volumes?

 

[GrofLuigi]

On Win7, I see Version : 3.1, not LFS Version, which is not present in the output of fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo C: . Maybe Win7 doesn't expect new LFS versions? AFAIR this "bug" also affected Win7, or in other words, it started with Win8 and every disk formatted by a lower OS version than 8 is affected by any higher OS version.

The registry value NtfsDisableLfsUpgrade fixed it for me, so much so that I almost forgot about it. It is always one of the first things I apply to any new installation >8, before it has a chance to see a <8 drive, and never had any problems.

GL

[Nomen]

6 hours ago, GrofLuigi said:

On Win7, I see Version : 3.1, not LFS Version,

 

What is that 3.1 version then?  Version - of what?

 

[GrofLuigi]

13 hours ago, Nomen said:

What is that 3.1 version then?  Version - of what?

NTFS Version.

GL

 

 

[jaclaz]

That happened (a lot) when Windows 2000 came out (as 120 days trial).

The NTFS filesystem is updated (silently, without warnings or messages) to a higher version, incompatible with NT 4 (some compatibility has been introduced in SP4).

A "vanilla" NT 4.00 install CD won't recognize the filesystem, you need an install media with integrated the minimum SP4 that takes into account the changes, see:

Here is a reference on how to make a NT 4 install media with integrated SP6, but YMMV:

http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=2383

https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/winnt4.htm

jaclaz