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.
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.
I was the Assistant Network Administrator at my high school (while I was in high school). We used Citrix software to push a master image out to all the school computers over PXE. When a PC rebooted, it re-downloaded the latest image, so anything saved to the local hard disk was wiped. I was responsible for maintaining the master image and worked at the school during my summer breaks to install software for the forthcoming school year as well as upgrade software on staff computers (which were local installs, not part of the Citrix image). I helped migrate the school computers from a Windows XP-based image to a Windows 7 image, and later the Citrix server was replaced with Microsoft's SCCM. Every quarter, the IT people would stay late on a Friday, order a bunch of pizza and soda, and have a LAN party in one of the computer labs. We had a "secret" games image with CounterStrike, Half-Life, CoD 4, and other games installed, and all it took was one click on the Citrix server followed by a reboot command and the whole lab was a gamer's paradise! Boy, the trouble I would've gotten in if I forgot to restore the lab before Monday! >:)
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
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’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
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…
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).
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 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.
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).
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.
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 .
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?
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?
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…
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!
