From: williams@nssdcs.gsfc.nasa.gov (Jim Williams)
Subject: Installation adveNTures with NT
Cc: williams
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 18:31:32 GMT


First, I hope this is the right place to post this.
comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32 seems to be the only group
discussing NT, even though my questions are more of the .setup
variety.  Perhaps we need a comp.os.windows-nt.* hierarchy...

Anyway, I finally got NT onto my machine last night.  I had to use a
round about method, as the CD-ROM I borrowed from work wasn't
recognized.  This is odd, since it is mentioned in the hardware list.
I have an Adaptec 1542B SCSI controller and the CD-ROM is from one of
our Silicon Graphics Indigos.  Its a Toshiba 3301.  Perhaps SGI
tampers with the ROM in some way...?

During the installation, I had the opportunity to select what video
card I have installed.  I have a Diamond Speedstar 24 (the ET4000
model, not the 24X), so I selected TSENGLABS 1024x768X16.  This was a
mistake.  After installation, when I booted NT, all I got was a blank
screen.  Thinking it might be the Speedstar, which has some
non-standard quirks, I replaced it with the Generic ET4000 card I
have.  This also didn't work.  I could find no documentation on how to
make use of the "Emergency Repair Disk" that Setup creates, and I
couldn't find anything in the /winnt tree that looked helpful, so just
trashed the whole thing and started over.  This time I just settled for
VGA and that worked.  However, on the second go around, when it came
time to create the "Emergency Repair Disk", the formatting phase went
incredibly slowly.  I eventually poped the disk out and let Setup die.
It noticed the disk was out, but when I put a different disk in, it
didn't handle that and just froze.  I rebooted and found NT to be ok,
so I don't think I lost anything, other than not having a repair
floppy.

So, my questions are:

Any idea why my CD-ROM didn't work?

Does the ET4000 Tseng driver work at 1024x768?  Any ideas why I got a
blank screen?

How can I make an emergency repair disk manually?  What good is it?

How do I run convert?  I want to make one of my partitions into an
NTFS partition but I can find no documentation for convert.

Thanks!
Jim

PS - Here's my machine's specs:

[Motherboard]
Soyo 386DX 25MHz 8 MBytes RAM no cache (believe to be a Micronics clone).
Cyrix 387DX coprocessor
C&T chipset
AMI BIOS

[Keyboard]
Northgate Model 102

[Video]
# was Diamond SpeedStar 24, Tseng ET4000X Chip, 1MByte Video Ram, 24-bit DAC.
Purtek 16-bit VGA, Tseng ET4000 Chip, 1MByte Video Ram.

[Monitor]
NEC 4D

[DiskController]
Adaptec 1542B SCSI

[FloppyDisks]
A: 3.5" High Density Canon Hydra Dual Media
B: 5.25" High Density Canon Hydra Dual Media

[HardDisks]
SCSI 0: Fujitsu 357MB SCSI (split into three partitions).
SCSI 1: Quantum 250 40MB SCSI
SCSI 2: Seagate 296N 84MB

[IOPorts]
InPort mouse port
3 serial (on is built in to the modem)
1 parallel

[Mouse]
Microsoft InPort Bus Mouse

[Printer]
Okidata 192 on parallel port 1

[Modem]
Practical Peripherals 14400FX with built in 16550 UART on COM3.

[Other]
X-10 house controller on serial port 1
HP95LX docking station on port 2
-- 
Spoken: James W. Williams			Company: Hughes STX
Internet: williams@nssdcs.gsfc.nasa.gov		Phone: +1 301 286-1131
USPS: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Code 633; Greenbelt, MD 20771
Maryland Car Tags: DEV CAR
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32