IBM SG24-4763-00 manual Pre-installation Considerations

This soft copy for use by IBM employees only.

Chapter 3. Pre-installation Considerations

This chapter is aimed at providing guidelines regarding hardware, software and capacity consideration requirements when installing NT 4.0.

Windows NT Server 4.0 is a 32-bit operating system and is very hardware intensive. With most 16-bit operating systems, such as DOS, hardware is not accessed until it is required. Under Windows NT, hardware drivers are written to and polled much more heavily for input/output (I/O) instructions. Hardware problems that have gone unnoticed or have seemed to be minor under other operating systems are likely to be amplified when running under Windows NT.

3.1 Hardware Requirements

The following are the minimum hardware requirements for installing NT 4.0:

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16 MB of RAM

VGA level video support Keyboard

IDE, EIDE, SCSI, or ESDI hard disk drive 486/25 processor or better

CD-ROM drive, 1.44 MB or 1.2 MB floppy disk drive, or active network connection

Network card

IBM Adapters

Refer to Appendix D, ªTips on Windows NT and IBM Hardwareº on page 155 for information about common problems found with IBM network adapters.

Although the minimum memory requirement is 16 MB, this offers only minimal functionality. As a result, Microsoft recommends 32 MB of RAM or more. Microsoft also recommends a 486DX2/50 or better processor. The minimum space requirements for Windows NT Server 4.0 is 124 MB.

See 3.2, ªSetup Optionsº on page 63 for more information.

Verify that there are no power-on self-test (POST) errors prior to starting the installation process. Also, make certain that each adapter and peripheral device is set to an independent IRQ, memory address, and DMA channel.

3.1.1 Enhanced IDE (EIDE) Drive Considerations

NT 4.0 supports only the following EIDE addressing schemes:

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Logical Block Addressing (LBA)

ONTrack Disk Manager

EZDrive

Extended Cylinder Head Sector (ECHS)

Note: Only the IBM PC Server 310 has an EIDE controller as standard.

 Copyright IBM Corp. 1997 61