Emulator Running text mode Setup
This page owns: the end-to-end recipe for installing Windows NT 4.0 onto an emulated Apple Network Server — every key you press, from the first Open Firmware prompt to "This portion of Setup has completed successfully".
Roughly 25–40 minutes of wall-clock time. Nothing is written to your CD image at any point. Read The boot floppy first: this page assumes you have one and that your machine is configured the way that page describes.
| A built emulator | Getting Granny Smith |
| An ANS ROM and a stock NT 4.0 PowerPC CD image | Media you must supply |
tmp/boot-floppy.img |
The boot floppy |
| A partitioned disk image | Preparing disks |
| A machine with 64 MB of RAM | not the 32 MB default — see the boot-floppy page |
No patched CD. No pre-go checkpoint. Both were retired on 15 September; if you have notes
telling you to make either, they are out of date.
Cold-boot the machine. The firmware tries its default boot device, fails, and drops to 0 >:
disk2:aix can't OPEN: /bandit/53c825@11/sd@2,0:aix
To continue booting from the default boot device type:
BOOT<return>
ok
0 >
That failure is normal — disk2 is the ROM's own default and nothing is there.
Type, once per machine:
load fd:,\setup.of
load-base loadsize evalThe machine prints powermac-nt-hal: setting little-endian mode, then resetting and restarts.
Wait for the 0 > prompt to come back.
Then type, every boot:
load fd:,\boot.of
load-base loadsize evalYou should see the veneer load and the OEM disk read into RAM:
Loading PE/COFF image_base 50000
powermac-nt-hal: reading the OEM disk into RAM (this takes a while) .........
powermac-nt-hal: B40 blocks of the OEM disk are in RAM
powermac-nt-hal: starting Windows NT Setup
Open Firmware ARC Interface Version 3.0
Booting from 'multi(0)scsi(0)cdrom(0)fdisk(0)\PPC\SETUPLDR'
B40 is 0xB40 = 2880 blocks, the whole floppy. If you get VrOpen returned 8 here, the CD is
not at id 0 on the first controller.
Setup loads its files and stops at the computer-type menu. The list is all IBM and Motorola machines; none of them is this one.
Press: ↓ to Other, then Enter.
Then: Enter again when it asks for the manufacturer-supplied disk — the floppy is already in
the drive.
You are offered exactly one entry:
Apple Network Server 500/700
Press Enter to take it. Setup loads \HALSHINR.DLL off the floppy.
Setup shows what it recognised. Out of the box that is only the Symbios adapter.
Press
S, thenOther, then Enter for the support disk, and pick "Apple Desktop Bus keyboard and mouse, and the OEM disk (powermac-nt-hal)".
Your screen should then list two devices, as above. Press Enter to continue.
Do not skip this. The keyboard works right now because SETUPLDR takes input through the
firmware — but NT's own keyboard stack starts later, and \Device\KeyboardPort0 only exists if
this driver is loaded. Skip it and Setup dies several screens on with
Setup did not find a keyboard connected to your computer.
which is unrecoverable and costs you the whole run. The same driver also serves the OEM disk as
\Device\Floppy0, which the file-copy phase needs.
Press Page Down until you reach the end — eighteen times. Then F8 to accept.
(In the web UI these need the build of 17 September or later; before that the Apple Extended Keyboard block was missing from the browser's key map and neither key reached the guest.)
This is the screen that proves the floppy worked. It should read:
Computer: Apple Network Server 500/700
Display: Cirrus Logic 54M30 (Apple Network Server 500/700)
Keyboard: XT, AT, or Enhanced Keyboard (83-104 keys)
Press Enter on "The above list matches my computer."
A disk from Preparing disks shows unpartitioned space, a 32 MB C:
and a 478 MB D:.
Press ↓ twice to land on D:, the 478 MB partition:
Press Enter to install to it.
C:is the ARC system partition. Do not install to it — it exists to holdOSLOADER.EXEandHAL.DLLwhere the firmware can read them, and Setup puts them there itself.
Press Enter on "Leave the current file system intact (no changes)", which is already highlighted.
Do not choose NTFS. The firmware and the veneer read FAT only; an NTFS volume here cannot be booted.
Press Enter to accept \WINNT.
Press ESC to skip the exhaustive examination. It finds nothing on an image and costs several minutes.
The file copy runs for ten to fifteen minutes. Then:
Press Enter. With a HAL from 17 September or later the machine actually restarts — the HAL sends Cuda a RESET SYSTEM command and the firmware comes back. With an older one it sits on "Restarting computer…" for ever; that is not a hang in Setup, and nothing is lost — every file is on disk before that prompt appears. Stop the machine and cold-boot it.
The guest's writes live in the emulator's own copy of the image. From a script, or the shell:
machine.scsi2.device[0].image.export("tmp/nt-installed.img")
It refuses to overwrite, so remove the destination first. Do not rely on killing the process: see Capturing the installed image.
A disk with an ARC system partition carrying \OS\WINNT40\{HAL.DLL,OSLOADER.EXE,VENEER.EXE} and
a 478 MB volume carrying \WINNT. Text-mode Setup is half the install; the GUI half runs from
the disk you just made.
- Booting the installed system — including GUI-mode Setup
- Capturing the installed image
- Error codes seen — when a stage does not look like this