Compaq Deskpro EN 300A - Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Install
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- What do you do when your retro enterprise machine doesn't have a CDROM drive, and you need to install NT 4? Join us as we perform a flawless 100% network-based install using PXE. No floppies or discs!
Unfortunately Microsoft.com's website is not backwards compatible with Internet Explorer 2.0, but we were able to surf the web and read about Windows NT 4.0's amazing features through FrogFind.com from @ActionRetro!
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Music: VOYAGER 1 by John Tasoulas
#retro #windows #90s
A very long time ago I worked in the college IT support department of a large community college. We routinely reinstalled NT and Windows 98 over the Ethernet using a standardized boot floppy for all the computers of a computer lab, clearing out all the junk, obscene images, and strange configurations imposed by the students over the course of a week's use. At that time I marveled how from one folder on a server located six blocks away all the computers could be freshly reinstalled in roughly 20 minutes. We could do the whole building, 6 computer labs in all, in less than an hour. This was on ordinary Gateway computers so very long ago in 1998.
When I was in college back in 1999, my the PCs in the computer labs ran Windows 95, and when you logged out of the computer, it would restart in pxe mode and redownload a fresh image on it so it was always clean. It was not a bad way to do it at that time.
@@storm2k internet cafés around here did that too.
I'm an IT tech at a school district. We have an SCCM imaging server with several images we use. I still find it amazing how we can re-image computers at school sites that miles away from our IT office. We have some sort of metro ethernet through AT&T so we have L2 access across our sites, but its still amazing how that all works and how quickly we can re-image devices.
@@JJFlores197 Today I (telecom tech) connected 2 schools via a underground optic fiber so they can do what you just said among other things.
Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s and now working as a systems engineer today gets the nostalgia feels going, great content!!
Great video! Just a very small correction: Service Pack 6a is actually the last Service Pack for NT 4.0. Cheers!
As part of a Y2K team I installed a PIXE boot unattended install of WINNT on hundreds of machines with just a floppy disk in my pocket. THANKS for the memories dude
You should install some era-accurate server software. Something that this machine might actually be running. Like an Exchange server or a webserver.
I remember installing NT4 a lot when I was a student, we ran a SETI@Home farm with everyone’s old machines in a spare room at work 😀 For a while we were around #3 in the rankings until the IT department found out and objected to our use of electricity and bandwidth…
you’re like a mix of psychogiraffe and dragua1 which instantly made me sub, keep up the good content was fascinating watching you try to configure and setup NT 4.0 through network
NT4 UI so much better than pretty much everything else MS did since.
id like to know more about your PXE environment. great content on this channel
Good idea!
I was such a proponent of OS/2 back when NT 3.5 came out, but I couldn't get past the comparatively antiquated GUI. NT 4.0 changed all that though--you could have the cutting edge (at the time) OS with that glorious Windows 95 GUI. I tried to install it on my old PS/2 Model 80 tower, but the first generation 386 chip on board was incompatible.
Watching this video reminded me just how far we've come with plug'n'play hardware and setup
Too bad OS/2 lost. IBM gave up too soon!
My first os/2 flavor was 2.1, and I used it through v4. Preferred it over its MS counterparts by a wide margin.
Not so well known fact: if you format the partition to NTFS from the NT installer, it in fact first creates a FAT partition silently, and immediately converts it into NTFS. Therefore all the usual limitations if FAT applies to filesystems created this way (e.g. max size of the NTFS partition can be 4GB).
I think I still have a NT 4.0 install disk, my company was still using that in 2000! Wow!!
Oh man here's a flashback. Back in the shipyards, whole team of people doing a rollout of spankin new Compaqs with NT4. Office 97 in network mode... Oracle client both 16 and 32 bit for a few corp apps.. helped make it all work back in the .dll h*ll dayz..
The nostalgia in your video! One of my first tech certifications was on Compaq Deskpro. I’ve installed Windows 95 via floppy on more of those than I can remember counting.
Try to find the all-in-one version of this unit. They had architecture where the computer system slid out the back on a tray, leaving the monitor and case behind.
I LOVE the DeskPro series
Thanks for the video. I never got to see or use Windows NT, as it was always 9x at home and then to 2000/XP.
Old memories. Forgot about the “Lock” command.
Remember getting the NT 3.51 CD from the MS development team.
Pre-occupied with LAN migrations from IPX to TCP/IP (ironic since started with 3Com/MS in 1983).
Fast forward to end of 1990s and getting Windows 2K … Very Stable OS (great).
the older i get, the more i do actually miss the old windows style
great quality, good luck mate
I had that Deskpro model running IPCop firewall throughout my student years up until 2008 in my apartment. Got it used from a scrap pile on my summer job in IT department. And yes, it had NT when i got it.
Nice video 📹 thx for sharing!
Interesting. When I used to prep NT machines back in the day, I used to just create one partition and copy over the i386 directory to it and then start the set up from there. You can convert the format of the drive at a later date. I've never seen anyone create a C: just for the installation media before.
That's what I would've wrote unless someone else got there first. And you are right. So much can be done with unattended.inf
Interesting! Thank you. Also I didn't know about the Lock command. Hopefully I'll never have to use it, but good to know!
Great video
Oh nice, this was my first own computer
BSOD guarantee: Try to install a ISDN adapter in a Compaq with NT 4.0. (Or any PC with NT 4.0 pre SP6 for that matter)
Service Pack 6a was the last service pack for NT 4.
This sure brings back memories! When I worked at my internship back in 2001, the company ran NT 4.0 on Compaq workstations & servers and they were as dream to use compared to Win98 which was more crash prone (why I use Linux at home). I monitor all the remote servers and if anything went down or needed hard drives replace I call Compaq's tech support and they send someone at the site right away.
Too bad it all came to an end when Compaq was bought up by "The New HP" who completely ruined the tech support department. It's gotten so bad that the company switched over to IBM servers running Windows 200 Server and I was gone by then.
I used a dos boot disk to get onto network then map a drive Z. and run a command winnt /s:z:\i386 /u:z:\Startup\vmw2.txt (vmw2.txt) this file contents the unattended setup. you could walk away from the PC, This was before PXE boot around 1994 .
Use service pack 6A 👍
is there any sort of how to guide on setting up a pxe server to work like yours does in the video?
In the old days we just copied nt40 to the hdd and then booted from a dos floppy and rand the nt installer
I got a bootable MS Windows NT4 Server Server CD from where I could install my MS Domain Controller ob a PII System as far as I remember
Didnt some of those Compaqs also have a weird install routine that required setting up the bios on the hard drive partition with a file from thier website too?
what pxe server you were using?
Naturally you'll need to install Lotus Notes 😂
Can you talk how you setup your Linux pxe boot for windows installs?
You would need a boot drive, possibly cdrom or usb that has network drivers installed.
What did you use for PXE booting on Linux?
Novell ZenWorks 😊
Damn, looks like we're never going to get the "interesting factory upgrade option" ☹
does it have oem info
There was definitely a floppy install of NT 4. I believe it was 24 disks or thereabouts. I spent many days installing it that way. Not sure if it was official from Microsoft or from Dell or whoever we bought from at the time…
I remember Oracle for DOS was over 30 floppies...
Man, I remember those days of building the WinNT from disk. Oh, and yes it did come with 15 floppy disks to install the WinNT boot up executable.
But if you missed a step, you may corrupt the drive, requiring a new whopping 4Gb disk drive. A 10Gb hard disk drive was out of this world. Who needs 10Gig of data? Are you a Satellite company? No one needs drives that big.
30yrs later a 10TB drive, why do you need a flash drive that big. 20yrs from now, 10 Peta bytes, I mean really do you need the entire digital galaxy in your system?
a fresh install is not needed, you can restore for a Compaq Nt4 restore CD.
Doesn't this model have USB? You should get a USB DVD Drive, it would save a lot of time.
If it does, it would be USB 1.1, which would be slow, and it probably wouldn't have BIOS support for booting USB. More importantly, NT 4 doesn't support USB at all!
Windows NT as originally designed by Dave Cutler wasn't bad. Microsoft immediately ruined it, and every version since then has been awful.