Installing Windows NT 3.51 on VMware
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With some care, Windows NT 3.51 can be installed and run on VMware vSphere ESXi and probably others. Some points to note:
- Virtual hardware with a maximum of 8 PCI busses must be used (i.e., version 4). The OS will hang early in the boot phase if attempted to run from v7 hardware, and report 256MB more RAM than has been allocated (due to the AGP aperture size)
- DMF floppy disk images cannot be used, so installation must be completed from a virtual CD-ROM
How-to Guide
- Create a v4 VM (OS type "other 32-bit") with 1GB HDD, 32MB RAM, BusLogic SCSI, IDE CD-ROM and Flexible NIC
- Since DMF floppy images can't be mounted in an ESX VM, an ISO of the the install media is required:
- Create an ISO file using files (and folder structures) extracted from all DMF disks (being disks 4 to 23), extracting all files from the disks "over-the-top" of each other, such that one big i386 folder is created, and a bunch of other stuff.
- Answer yes to overwriting any existing files, as some are repeated throughout the disk set (for example protocol.ini).
- Create two empty files in the root of the extract folder named "cdrom.s" and "cdrom.w".
- Next create an ISO from the extract folder.
- Power on the VM and boot from floppy disk 1, changing to disks 2 and 3 as prompted.
- Mount the ISO and select 'Install from CD' when prompted.