Yes Virginia there are still NT Machines

For all of you out there that are young pups who have to listen to people like me say I remember the day and trust me there are older days actually, Punch cards for example,vaacum tubes, if we really want to go for the gusto lets talk about an abacus. Now that's out of the wayonto the real matter at hand.

After an enjoyable weekend enter the dreaded Monday. Set the scene with an entrance into another dimension where everybody in the meeting is talking about how well the production line is running. Lulled into this false sense of security I come out of the meeting to discover that yes indeed there must be some sort of strange vacuum in the conference room which allows for an alternate set of reality to play out. With the alternate reality bubble burst you are immediately accosted by a technology that was developed when I was growing up and what fun would it be without having to remember how to actually use it.

Now if anybody does a little Google search out there you will find that there is a cult of people who are dedicated to the soul survival of the NT operating system. Oh yes they fill your head with ideas such as it was the most stable OS Microsoft made and it runs circles around the newer operating systems. Excuse me while a clear my throat and point out that Windows NT doesn't have a native USB driver system. Not happy with the answer I resolve to search for a way to make this OS bow down and do the wok I have asked it to do.

The first thing you will run across is a lot of people battling back and forth swearing that NT will not do the USB trick. In fact, one site had a person state it was not possible. This is not re assuring at all for my hopes of teaching this old dog new tricks. After a few more links you start to see rumblings of the Woodhead project. This was a developer who actually designed an open source answer to the nightmare.Try following the link on those pages and you will be greated with an error from Yahoo which took over geocities, sigh geocities.com I remember those days. So our first try was a dead end. Next, we find a link to Bsquare's site. Once again this is a no go. I even tried following a direct link and it failed. So maybe it is impossible to actually add USB to NT. When you are at a stopping point you most likely find that gem you are looking for enter a link to Dell's NT driver stack at ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/utility/Intea01i.exe It was introduced in 2003 for some of it's laptops not that I would recommend running it on a laptop as most desktops had problems running the OS itself. So some people at this point are saying “but you said it wasn't possible and that Micosoft didn't release drivers”. Yes that's right, the trick is that some drivers were made by the device manufactures and this is yet again the saving grace. This new driver is better than there original Inside Outside networks released device driver..
So by this point you have figured out that I needed USB to solve my problem and that the OS of the machine was Windows NT. Whatever happened to cause this rip in the time continuum. Simple a user on a production NT machine “locked up” and said he then flipped the power switch. No anybody who knows enough about the nightmare that is disk recovery has officially cringed at the thought of this but add an infant NTFS filesystem to this picture and you might as well as run naked through a highschool gymnasium and hope no one sees you. This is where my first tech called back.

He listened and cringed in horror and proceeded down the path of do you have the ERD disk. What's that ? Oh dear God you have summoned the fury of Hell on a Monday morning and you didn't at least have your underwear on ? Yes sad but true we plunge on to insert the installation disk for Windows NT workstation naked to the world. This is when NT promptly spanks you squarely on the butt and says "I don't think so!". You are prompted for the ERD disk but also given the option of allowing NT to detect where it is. Blinded by the need for a miracle you say surely they wouldn't offer to let it detect the NT installation if it wouldn't. Yet again you are walking naked down the hall and just asking to be slapped yet again. Haven't we learned yet from the horrible mistake? Slap! I guess not because now we have the lovely screen that says windows couldn't find an installation but if you have an ERD disk it would be more than happy to help you out. Wow an ERD disk what a concept. Those who took some training on the NT platform this was drilled into your head. Heck even windows 2000 had it all over the place. so know we have discovered that there is no repairing the installation which would have been nice seeming it has a tool that checks the registry keys. that would have been so much shorter but it wouldn't be fun any other way.

Okay lets boot the system and see what our issue really is? The fateful blue screen of hope, at least it tells you what is going on so there is hope, displays last known good is missing. Google this and you will be surprised to learn that this was a known issue that you need surprise, surprise an ERD for. Okay so if you don't have one Microsoft recommends you install NT 4.0 parallel to the existing OS . With this accomplished you then drop to the repair directory and backup the current system hive and use the expand command to restore the original system hive. Anybody who has done this kind of restore compares the two files and is immediately alarmed at the factor that the default hive file is no where near the size of the current, diagnosis “That can't be good”.

Instead somebody who has completed a system recovery knows that there are tools to scan and correct errors in the registry. In the end this will save us time that we already don't have enough of in a day. Prepare to be amazed at the power of the Hiren Boot CD. This CD is an IT must and is located at http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd. It contains any and all utilities that you could wish for including a mini windows 98 environment. All from the comfort of a Linux environment. Side note you haven't taken the time to learn Linux then you are like the Unix administrators who never thought NT was a viable solution.

Okay plug a USB thumb drive into that bad beast of a computer, hold on why is the controller card in there, and navigate to the dos tools. Proceed to the USB support, and then let the questions begin. First it will ask you what USB drivers to actually load. In most cases the 3rd option that has three options works. The key here is that you don't want to overload the memory because this will cause unexpected responses. On the other options I would not suggest selecting anything you don't have to such as the SCSI drivers, but do make sure you load the CD-Rom drivers otherwise you will be rebooting and doing this all over again.

Once you are at a command line prompt type ntfs4dos. This command will actually load a utility that allows you to both read and write to NTFS partitions. The crucial part being the writing. Now for the magic let's change to our USB drive, mine was S: and give the command “copy c:\winnt\system32\config\system system”. Follow this with “copy c:\winnt\system32\config\system system.bk” so that we have a backup copy also. The next part may require you to reboot if the registry reanimation tool gives you trouble. If it does return an error a reboot with loading only the USB drivers and not the ntfs4dos command will fix the issue. You now have a copy of the infamous system registry which contains the “Last known good menu” entry.
To repair the file is actually fairly easy. Change to the directory of the system registry key you made previously and type “rehive system”. This will launch a program called registry re animator. It will look through the registry and tell you when it finds an error. Accept to fix each one of these errors and at the end save the file if prompted. Now if you had to reboot and not use the ntfs4dos command you will want to rerun it, otherwise proceed onwards.

The last step is easy but involves a lot of praying and secret Voodoo rituals. We have managed to backup the file and copy it to yet another location to be repaired. The final step is to tell it to copy the repaired file on your USB to the c:\winnt\system32\config directory. “And now ladies and gentlemen prepare to be astounded” , now that we have the file copied back start to perform those secret rituals as the computer boots. Once it comes back up you will need to make sure that you make that ERD you should have had in the first place instead of hoping the registry can be recovered through an easy but time consuming process. Well until I write again consider yourself warned and remember nothing replaces a good backup. In these days there are plenty of automated backup solutions that use great encryption, and allow you to easily access your data in case of problems for $5 or less. After all if your building burns down you may be calling on even darker rituals to recover that tape media that was in a convection oven instead of off site being watched 24-7.