Has anyone managed to install and boot NT 3.1? Managed to install but it gets stuck at the boot screen.
it works under Parallels 4 I was cleaning out my closet today and found a copy of NT 3.1. I thought it would be a fun afternoon project to see if I could install it in Parallels. "Fun" is relative, of course. But it works I used the following VM settings: - OS type: MS-DOS - OS version: Other DOS - Memory: 32 MB - Video: 2MB - Hard Disk 1: 0.2GB [- Network adapter: You can have it enabled; I found the correct RealTek driver online and it installed properly, but I couldn't get the TCP/IP settings to work correctly; the 3.1 stack doesn't have DHCP; I didn't care enough to play around with the settings.] [NT 3.1 only supports SCSI CD-ROMS--and only if connected to ID 2 or higher. No matter, because the install disc doesn't have the correct SCSI driver for Parallels. If you only have the install CD-ROM, you can create a Parallels DOS machine, locate the correct Parallels IDE CD-ROM drivers, and run winnt.exe in \i386 on the CD-ROM drive. winnt.exe copies the NT installation files to the VM hard disk and creates a boot floppy that looks for the installation files on the hard disk. If you want to get the CD-ROM working, turn on advanced settings, set ID to 2, and hunt around for the correct SCSI driver. I haven't bothered to see if the driver is easy to find.] Most important: you have to intercept the installation program before it reboots into the graphical NT setup program for the first time. This is because the graphical portion of the NT installer doesn't understand Parallels' emulated CPU. The easiest way to do this: Select custom setup Tell setup to create FAT partition (so that you can mount it easily in Mac OS X.) After disk 10 or so, setup will tell you to remove the disk from the drive and press ctl-alt-del. Don't do that. Shut down the virtual machine. Mount the FAT partition you've started installing NT 3.1 onto. On the mounted virtual partition, open the following in TextWrangler, BBEdit, or some other program that handles PC line breaks properly: \winnt\system32\system.inf \winnt\system32\initial.inf Near the beginning of both those files there is the line: STF_PROCESSOR = "" ? $(!LIBHANDLE) GetProcessor You need to change that to: STF_PROCESSOR = I586 (This tricks the NT installation script--it wants to poll the hardware and see if it recognizes the CPU type; this change just tells the script that the computer has a Pentium processor and removed the command that polls the hardware.) Now you can boot the VM and continue the installation as normal.
