From: Gary Britt 

Frank, thanks for all the good advice.  The SP6a isn't slip streamed its a
second CD.  So I imagine the install CD is plain original NT4.  Is the no
USB a limitation in NT4 or is that a limitation in the virtual environment?

Thanks,

Gary

Frank Haber wrote:
> Since I've just played with this (with SBS4/4.5, which is NT4).....
>
> The NT boot partition must be entirely within the first 8GB.  It doesn't
> have to be the first.  But the BIOS must inherently support 8GB
> partitions, if you don't want trouble later.  With no SPs, the boot
> volume should be >4MB. All this varies wildly for SCSI and RAID,
> depending on SP and whether your SCSI setup needs a floppy or not.  SCSI
> boots first, unless you have a late SP and/or a magic machine BIOS.
>
> If the install files are truly SP6a (slipstreaming didn't happen until
> later, so the creation process was extremely laborious for anyone but an
> OEM), you can have 8GB system and big secondary/extended partitions.
> Possibly only SP4 is required for this.
>
> There were subtle changes to NTFS over the service packs, so get up
> there as fast as possible with your patching, and fercryingoutloud don't
> try to defrag with old utils or other suicidal stuff.  I don't believe
> you got a defrag with NT4; in any case, everyone used Diskkeeper.  V5 or
> above should be fine.  Any Perfect Disk likewise.
>
> Everyone likewise used third-party backup.  Stick with simple-video
> programs. Luckily, your virtualized drivers will likely be better than
> half the ones people had to use, back in the day.
>
> Make sure you have boot floppies that work.  Make sure the floppy drive
> boots DOS.  If you have RAID, make two copies of the RAID install
> floppy.  And remember - YOU HAVE NO USB!!  Don't depend on thumb
> drives.  Get the network working smoothly, pronto, or plan on burning a
> lot of temp CDs.  I'd recommend NETBEUI on source and destination for
> real smoothness, but the virtual supervisor probably doesn't support
> that.  Stick with ONE, common, vanilla, known-good NIC.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5