On Fri, 31 Dec 2021 at 01:46, Deposite Pirate <dpir...@metalpunks.info> wrote: > > Windows NT was designed to work with FAT. Windows NT 4
... and the 3 earlier versions... > always > first formats the install partition as a FAT16 filesystem and then if > you selected NTFS at install, it converts the FAT16 file system online > to NTFS on the first reboot after install. Yep. > This typical Microsoftish genius idea, makes you jump through all kinds of > hoops > that include a third party online repartitioning tool to install it on > an NTFS partition bigger than 2Gb. That's unfair. I think it's connected with the way NT <5 bootstrapped an installation. Relevant digression: you can start NT installation from DOS. This was a very useful feature and I urged IBM to copy it, but the techies I spoke to could not understand why. NT 3.x predates EIDE; indeed I ordered and returned a bunch of very early EIDE Pentium 1 PCs because NT could only see the first 512MB of their 540MB disks. We had to swap them for SCSI machines. When NT 3.1/3.5/3.51 came out, most PCs could not boot from CD. Many CD drives were attached to sound cards via proprietary interfaces; Panasonic, Mitsumi and Sony were common: https://goughlui.com/2012/11/12/tech-flashback-before-atapi-cd-roms-were-proprietary-interfaces/ No OS could boot off these, and most only supported DOS and Win9x in DOS compatibility mode. This also made it possible to install over the network without a local CD drive. So, you could boot a PC under DOS, make a FAT partition, copy the NT files from the CD or a network server onto the FAT partition, run WINNT.EXE *under DOS* and it built a very minimal installation system on the hard disk. The folder name varied but it was something like C:\~$win.nt$\ Then it rebooted the PC into that, where a 2nd stage setup ran and built the real NT system. Then it rebooted into _that_. If you picked NTFS that now ran `CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS` on your drive. I don't think MS was trying to be awkward, and this functionality was a lifesaver. It allowed me at one corporate client to bring up a whole roomful of dozens of NT 4 machines with only a single optical drive on the server, which saved so much money it paid for about 2-3 more PCs. You could bypass the DOS step by booting from 3 special NT boot floppies, but the DOS method was quicker, easier and more versatile. Under OS/2 2.x and later, you only had the floppy method, and you had to get your CD working under those boot floppies, adding drivers, editing its vast multi-hundred-line CONFIG.SYS file to suit... it was a major pain. If there were no OS/2 drivers for your CD, then you had to copy the install files to a partition that the boot floppies could access. The setup program only ran under OS/2 2 itself and couldn't start from DOS. But the 2-stage NT setup is why it went through this format-as-FAT-then-convert process. It limited your Windows system drive to a max of 4GB until PartitionMagic came along, but it worked and it meant it was easy to get NT onto machines that OS/2 only installed upon with great difficulty, or not at all. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
