I need to do some testing on a Windows NT Server environment. I am trying to install Windows NT into the latest VMware Workstation. The 3 boot disks I have for Windows NT are in .exe form. How can I extract them and install the OS into VM?
Windows Server NT Install on VMware
vmware-workstationwindows
Related Solutions
Update: Microsoft has created the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool to make this very easy.
I used this guide as a set of directions - http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1665.entry
1. Get a USB Thumbdrive between 4-32GB.
If the drive is larger than 32GB, Windows cannot format it as FAT32, so an alternate utility must be used. Windows can still read FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB, though some devices cannot.
2. Run cmd.exe as administrator and enter the following commands followed by Enter
diskpartlist diskselect disk #(where # is your USB drive as determined from step 2)clean(This step will delete all data on your flash drive!)create partition primaryactiveformat fs=fat32 quickassignlist volumeexitbootsect.exe /nt60 F: /mbr(whereF:is the drive letter of your USB drive as reported bylist volume)
3. Copy the Windows files from the ISO or other source using robocopy
robocopy.exe E:\ F:\ /MIR
where E:\ is the source and F:\ is the destination. Drag-and-drop or copy/paste can also be used, if you know what you're doing.
Configure your PC to boot from the USB drive
In some machines the USB thumbdrive will appear to the BIOS as any other hard drive. You need to muck with the boot sequence to place the thumbdrive higher in the boot order than the local hard drive.
Note that after you do this you might want to reset the boot order in order to ensure that BitLocker doesn't detect boot changes based on the fact that the thumdrive is missing if it was there when you encrypted your drive.
Related Topic
- Inaccessible_boot_device after p2v Windows 2000 Pro SP4 to Workstation 6.5
- Windows – Experiencing corruption! What’s a good reliability test for a Windows file system, RAID or otherwise
- Moving Vmware Workstation VM to another host causes reactivation
- Linux – boot a linux live cd in VmWare
- Windows – Isolated subnet on Vmware Workstation for testing
Best Answer
Most Windows NT 4.0 CDs were bootable. Have you tried just booting the CD-ROM yet?
If you can't boot the CD and still want to create the "floppies", grab this virtual floppy driver and use the instructions from Microsoft to create disk iamges of each of the bootable floppies.
(Actually, you can find images of the Windows NT 4.0 boot disks in various places on the 'net, but you'd do well to make the disks from your particular CD-ROM if you can't get it to boot off of CD.)