Jul. 27th, 2001

theducks: (Default)
This afternoon at about 3:30pm one of our postgrad students came in and begged and pleaded with us to at least have one of three new machines setup and ready to go for the weekend, since he had asked on tuesday.. he didn't say they needed one by the weekend at the point, but anyway..

I was planning on leaving at about 4, but I took pity on the guy.. I know him pretty well, and he wouldn't be asking us last thing on friday afternoon unless it really was urgent.

So I do the nice thing and install Windows NT 4.0 on one of these new machines.

Yes, I know there's NT4.5, 5 and Win2000, but we as a department have decided if there's NT'ing to be done, it'll be with 4.0. I guess that makes stuff more uniform for us :)

The problem being, the installer CD for NT dates from 1996.. and installing it is verrry tricky. Without the service packs, NT can't deal with partitions larger than 4GB.. and all new disks are at least 20GB. Which makes installing.. *ahem* interesting.

This machine was also very tricky because the HDD was hooked up to a Promise ATA100 onboard RAID controller, which of course NT4 knows nothing about, and it has an Intel 100/PRO S ethernet adapter (VERY nice cards, but NT support for them bites ass :)

So how to install NT on this machine..

1) Download Promise ATA100 RAID drivers off CDROM onto floppy (in another machine)
2) Boot NT installer and hold down F6 while it's booting up... this makes it ask you for "mass storage device controller drivers" before it starts installing..
3) Put floppy with drivers for RAID into drive.. wait for setup to start..
4) Reboot..
5) Do NT install onto a 4GB partition (on a 20GB HDD), not adding machine to NT domain, because the NT provided drivers for the Ethernet card don't work..
6) Reboot..
7) Upgrade to service pack 6A, giving nice large drive support..
8) Reboot..
9) Install graphics card drivers (which needed service pack 5+ to install..)
10) Reboot..
11) Install Ethernet drivers, off disk created by downloading them from the Web..
12) Installed office97 ..
13) Reboot to a Symantec Ghost boot floppy..
14) Dump internal HD image to network server..
15) Suck image back off server, but tell it to be a 20GB partition, now that Windows can handle it..
16) Reboot.. and tada.. a nice new up and running NT machine.

All this took me about.. 2 hours I guess. Which is pretty good, even if I do say so myself.

The really cool part tho is that I can dump the Ghosted image onto one of the other machines they bought at the same time, and just change the SID and machine name..

So after spending 2 hours doing the first one, I can do the second one in about .. 10 mins :D

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