NT4 boot.ini

[thefossil]

I have an IBM at work w/NT4. Had an extra ATA-100 card so I installed it, card first, drivers next, then switched drive cable. It booted, but slowly and said it couldn't find drive 0 with the option to ignore.

Currently the drive is still attached to the card and system is operating but AIDA32 sees drive #2 there now (only one physical drive #2 with 2 partitions) which makes sense cuz the BIOS shows no drives attached on IDE 0 or IDE 1. I know I have to change the boot.ini to drive 2 but...

My question is this: In both the [boot loader] and [operating system] sections, do I change the "disk" value or the "rdisk" value to 2, or both? (I assume partition remains at (1) cuz I didn't change anything on the drive itself.)

After more research, maybe THIS is the question: If, technically, the ATA100 card shows as a SCSI device, do I need to change the word "multi" to "scsi" and leave everything else the same?

Thanks

[murray1]

You could try changing the word from "multi" to "scsi" , but first back up your boot.ini to a floppy in case it fails. If it does fail, you can restore your original boot.ini file by connecting the hard drive as a secondary master to another NT4 machine (disconnect the CDROM) and copy it back from there. I tried one of those "Promise" Ulta ATA 100 cards on 3 Compaq machines running WinNT4 and it booted slowly and it froze at the first boot up screen. It may be a BIOS problem . Those ATA-100 cards are big pain especially the ones by Promise. Does your machine have an option in the BIOS to boot from a SCSI card?

[thefossil]

backups are always a good idea, I guess. My boot drive is plain old FAT and it's the first partition so I think that saved me when I switched the cable. NT will boot to the first partition by default if the boot.ini is confused. Fortunately, that's where the driver for the Maxtor card lives.

If I change the the boot.ini and it doesn't work, wouldn't I just be able to boot to dos with a bootable dos floppy, use edit to change the boot.ini file (or copy the backed up file from floppy to c:) and reboot?

From winnetmag.com:
If you accidentally change your boot.ini file to point to the wrong partition, NT cannot start. This situation might occur if you copy a boot.ini file from another computer, where NT is on a different drive or partition. Alternatively, you might add a new primary partition to the disk and thus change the partition numbering. You can edit boot.ini to fix this type of problem. But be sure to change the file's attributes first, because it is a hidden system file.

Even if your boot.ini file is missing, NT can start. If NT is on the first controller, first drive, and first partition in the \Winnt directory (i.e., the default path), the OS can start without boot.ini.

After you clear up any boot.ini problems, the boot process can begin. If your system can boot NT or a DOS-based OS such as Win98 or Win95, you must decide which OS to boot to.

I'll find a dos floppy and try it a little later. Windows support is a little hazy on this, I don't think I have the option to boot to scsi in my ancient BIOS. Here's the windows support link:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;102873

[thefossil]

Follow up for NT4.0 users who are upgrading disk controllers:

After researching, making a Win98 Boot Disk w/ a backup copy of the boot.ini file, etc. I didn't use it or change anything in the boot.ini file. Remember that the system was booting (slowly) but popping up the "disk not found" error every 5 min. BIOS does not have option to boot from SCSI device.

What I did was go to System configuration (or was that Disk Configuration) window from the Accessories (system?**) window and looked at the current disk configuration. It looked good and there was the option to save, so I did. Rebooted normally, no more error messages and the speed has probably increased about 10-15% (or whatever improvement one gets from ata33 going to ata66, the maximum of the current hard drive).

I'm sure there are a few guys still using NT4.0 that would like a little speed-up for not a lot of money, without a complete upgrade. This worked for me on an IBM P500 system.

**not sure of the exact words, NT is a little different than Win98, but it's in the same general area on your start menu.