Some questions about NT3

[ChrisX64]

I've acquired a copy of NT 3.51 and would like to play around with it for nostalgia's sake I guess but I have a few questions on how to go about this - my system has no floppy drive so I can't use the floppy disks that come with NT. Is there anyway to make a bootable image of the install CD like NT4+ has? Secondly, I'm not that familiar with pre NT4 NTFS and really haven't found much documentation on it - so to those who are familiar with it - I ask what happens when you install (for multi boot) an NT3 partition in NT3's NTFS and then install a higher operating system such as 2003. My understanding is that 2003 will take the wonderfully wise course of 'upgrading' my partition to the new NTFS version. As I have found no patch or documentation for a patch to let NT3 read/write modern NTFS partitions, I figure this would kill my data. I really hate the FAT file system for a variety of reasons so I don't want to just go the easy route and make a small fat partition. So is there any workaround to let NT3 keep its own partition in the native legacy NTFS format or do I need to hide the partition from 2003?

On another note, I have also acquired a copy of NT 3.1 but it appears attempting to play around with this will prove futile. I'll ask the same questions as above anyway - with the additional note of wondering whether you can get IDE optical drives to run with pre-SP3 NT3.1.

Yes I've been called weird for wanting to run these obsolete (useless?) operating systems/software - I just like learning/seeing where things have come from and playing around with it. I'd still run NT 4 on everything if it would allow me to run all my software.

Thanks in advance,

Chris.

[cyberpyr8]

That is weird! But this might help you:

http://support.mpccorp.com/downloads/boot.html

They have some boot disks. I would think it would be easier to just add a floppy temporarily to load the OS.

I believe in 3.51 it was actually HTFS (High Tech File System?) and I know that it is not compatible with Windows 2000 and above. It has to be converted to NTFS first. If you install the 3.51 in a seperate partition and then load 2003 on a different partition, I don't see why that wouldn't work. I don't think that you will be able to read from one partition to the other though. It is similar to the way that if you dual boot a Windows 95 partition and a Windows NT 4 NTFS partition the Win95 OS couldn't read the partition with NTFS on it.

[Skyfrog]

Windows NT has always used the NTFS file system. I've never heard of HTFS; you may be thinking of HPFS from OS/2.

[os2fan2]

Windows NT3.x supports both HPFS and the NTFS. However you should format the partition in NTFS unless you are upgrading from OS/2. It will read older style HPFS (ie 2.x, 3.x, 4.0), not sure of the new style.

There are various proggies around that will upgrade pinball.sys (the hpfs driver) for use under Windows nt and 2k.

W