1. Oracle Corporation

The Windows 3.1 disks are not bootable. You must boot and install MS-DOS first, and then install Windows from the floppy from within MS-DOS, as if it were a videogame and not an operating system. Like, C: >A: A: >setup.exe Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical desktop shell than a full operating system. It runs as an application on DOS like any other. As the name suggests. I have spent quite some time here and on other sites looking for a valid windows 3.1 iso that can be loaded with VirtualBox.

Once the partnership with IBM faltered with the development of OS/2, Microsoft went alone and Windows NT was born back in 1993. Microsoft’s first true 32-bit operating system, it generally was to be seen only on high-end desktop workstations and servers. The first version was 3.1, to match the versioning of the more consumer orientated Windows 3.1 that was released a year prior. There was two editions – one named simply Windows NT 3.1 for workstation use, and the other named Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server which obviously suggests for servers on a network. A relative lack of 32-bit software and higher system requirements meant success was limited and most of the attention was towards MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.

Installing Windows NT 3.1 is certainly not the easiest Windows to install into VirtualBox due to a few limitations. It’s very easy for the VM to crash or for NT 3.1 to complain about the hardware due to what was available at the time. Back then, Intel had been beta testing their new Pentium processors to supersede the 486, and introduced the CPUID instruction set which allows software to identify the CPU’s features. By default, it’s a no go when installing unless Setup detects specific 386, 486, or Pentium processors. When the Pentium Pro processor was introduced this began to cause issues installing NT 3.1, and subsequently Pentium II and faster processors experienced the same problem. Setup would believe the processor was just not supported due to the changed value in the CPUID. Once you jump that hurdle during Setup, you think great it’s actually working once greeted with the login dialog box.

Upon typing your password, you’re greeted with a kernel crash no second sooner than Program Manager was to load. NT 3.1 crashing after attempting to login into my user account.

Other caveats included a lack of support for IDE CD-ROM drives or the PCI bus. This didn’t mean you couldn’t install on a computer with PCI slots, it just meant that if the PCI card plugged in had drivers available it would run in ISA/EISA compatibility mode. It was the first Windows version to include TCP/IP, however with no DHCP support it meant that you had to manually configure an IP address for the network connection. In 1993 a PC having 64 MB RAM wasn’t really heard of, though not impossible. Even the minimum requirements of 16 MB RAM was rather steep for that period so the following caveat wasn’t particularly concerning at the time. Depending on how the BIOS reports back the amount of memory available, NT 3.1 may only see no greater than 64 MB RAM.

Using VirtualBox this is definitely the case. However putting aside the technicality of this, it can support and utilise the same amount of RAM as any other 32-bit operating system. It’s been documented elsewhere that by replacing NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from NT 3.51’s Service Pack 5, you may then overcome this limitation. Microsoft had documented how this happens, though lacking in some historical context. KB117373 – Windows NT Recognises Only Up to 64 MB RAM on Some Computers With all of this taken into account, normally I’d just use NT 3.51 as these issues no longer existed and generally better supported by software, hardware drivers, and emulators. This had been a learning curve for me virtualising NT 3.1.

Windows Xp Oem untouched iso’s (XP-Pro,XP-Home,XP-MediaCentre and XP-64Bit) • Iso Editing utilities such as Ultra iso or Magic iso or any other similar softwares for editing the iso files. Steps To do: 1.Winxp professional rtm x86 eng vl oem retail untouched i.

For this walkthrough, I was originally using Oracle VirtualBox 5.1.10 on a Windows 10 machine. However I was experiencing NTOSKRNL.EXE crashes like the one just shown no matter what. When I downloaded Oracle VirtualBox 5.0.30 however, miraculously those crashes just disappeared. It’s a separate topic, but it does beg the question as to what changed with VirtualBox to cause this. For this guide you’ll need to have:.

Oracle VirtualBox installed (5.0.30 works, 5.1 – 5.1.14 didn’t work for me, 5.1.18 works). CD or ISO image of Windows NT 3.1 (you also could use the floppy disk version). Floppy disk or image of the “Setup Disk for CD-ROM installation” disk. Boot floppy disk or image with a text editor.

VirtualBox video driver. AMD PCNET network driver Setting Up The Virtual Machine In VirtualBox I created a VM (virtual machine) using Other Windows (32-bit) as the OS choice. In the wizard I adjusted the RAM size to 32 MB and created a 1 GB hard disk. Beginning NT 3.1 Setup. Setup detects the SCSI drive and asks whether you wish to install any additional SCSI adapters.

There isn’t anything else, so press Enter. If Setup says it cannot detect the optical drive, double-check your VM settings under Storage.

If okay, Setup proceeds to advise that the hard disk has either a non-standard operating system or hasn’t been used. Press C to continue. It then shows the unpartitioned disk space on the virtual hard disk. Although you may set up multiple partitions we’ll continue by pressing Enter to use the entire disk. The following choice is whether you wish to use the NTFS or FAT file system. For this exercise I’ll leave it up to you, but I chose Format to NTFS here.

Setup gives a warning about losing everything on the drive, press F to continue formatting the drive. Once formatted Setup asks where you wish to install NT 3.1, and will begin copying the files from the CD once confirmed. This shouldn’t take long to complete and at the end you will see the following that installation was successful.

End of installation. At this point, remove the NT 3.1’s Setup floppy disk and mount a DOS boot disk that has a text editor such as EDIT.COM. Then press Ctrl and Del together to give the Ctrl+Alt+Delete command to the VM to restart.

Once your VM starts up off the boot disk into DOS, open your text editor. I just used a MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk with MS-DOS Editor. From the A: drive type edit and press Enter. You likely won’t have the mouse driver loaded so it will be a matter of navigating with the keyboard. Open the file named INITIAL.INF founded under the C: WINNT SYSTEM32 directory. As shown below, the variable under ProcessorVar needs to be changed to force NT 3.1 to believe the processor is plain old original Pentium. If you see this, you know the changes to the INF files is working.

Follow the next few prompts regarding the computer name, and locality settings. When asked to select a printer, select Cancel where it will advise you that you can install one later using Print Manager. The next step is Setup will attempt to detect the network adapter and fails. Select Continue twice as another dialog box comes up regarding remote access.

Select No Network for the time being. Additional files are copies across and Program Manager appears creating icons and program groups. You’ll be prompted to provide an Administrator password followed by a user account and corresponding password. Pick your time zone, and create an Emergency Repair Disk if desired. Setup comes to a close and will ask to restart your computer.

Windows NT 3.1 login screen. Up until this point I was using VirtualBox 5.1.10, so I’ll continue with VirtualBox 5.0.30.

After confirming your user account credentials, you’ll likely run into an error about a service not starting up though you’ll still be able to continue and Program Manager now appears. Service Pack 3 Now that NT 3.1 is installed, it’s time to install the last major service pack for it. As with other versions of NT, you don’t need to install the earlier service packs beforehand. Originally the service pack was provided via CD, 9 floppy disks, or online via BBS or FTP. Download the Service Pack 3 ZIP file (original) I’ve also rearranged the service pack files for easy installation from CD as an ISO image that you can download also. Download Service Pack 3 ISO file Once complete, you’ll need to restart and voila all the major updates have been installed.

Windows NT 3.1 with the improved video driver installed. Configuring Sound Getting wavetable sound to work is quite easy with NT 3.1 and doesn’t require additional drivers. Heading into Control Panel from the Main program group, and double-click on Drivers. Select Add in the Drivers dialog box Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.x in the list. Highlight it and select OK. With the drivers installed, a dialog box will show to confirm the port and interrupt to use.

Use 220 for the port, and 5 for the interrupt. You will need to restart Windows for the sounds to take effect.

Installing network drivers. An additional dialog box appears to install the driver from a floppy disk. Using the AMD PCNET driver disk image, you need to change the path to A: winnt to successfully retrieve it. A Select OEM Option dialog box should appear with the only optioned named AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter as the choice. When the driver is installed, a configuration dialog box appears however you may continue but selecting OK with the default settings. With the adapter installed, it’s time to change the network protocols installed. Back in the Network Settings dialog box, choose Add Software.

Similar to adding the adapter, a dialog box appears with a list of various protocols and services. Choose TCP/IP Protocol from this list and select Continue. You’ll need to have your NT 3.1 CD or floppy handy to install. Once the files are copied across, the protocol will appear under the Installed Network Software box. You may also from here remove NetBIOS and NetBEUI protocols as they won’t be of any use these days.

When you select OK on the Network Settings dialog box, as the TCP/IP protocol was just installed it will request information about which IP address and gateway to use for your network. Requesting the IP address and gateway to use.

As the VM has the network settings to be a bridged adapter, I used the IP address from my home router as the gateway, and used an IP address in the same range as my own physical computers on the network that I know isn’t being used by anything. Once a static IP address that is appropriate for your network, you should be able to ping to other computers by their IP address.

However to resolve by the computer’s name which is much easier to remember, you need to configure DNS which is typically done by either your server or home’s gateway. Back in the TCP/IP Configuration dialog box, select Connectivity to bring up the TCP/IP Connectivity Configuration dialog box. Here you can change your VM’s host (computer) name and choose whether to look up for using the DNS settings here and/or using a host file. For this I selected DNS Only as I won’t be using a host file. Directly below it I enter the same IP address as used for the Default Gateway where you click on Add resulting in the IP address to move across to the right hand side as below.

Adding the gateway’s IP address. With the IP address entered, click OK three times to complete and close the network settings. Your NT 3.1 VM should now be useable over your network, although personally I had mixed results with this. The good part was that I could successfully download a copy of Netscape Navigator (a popular web browser from the 1990s) off my own FTP server, and that I could connect to shares via File Manager on my Windows Server 2012 home server. The bad part was I wasn’t getting much love from the Windows Server 2003 R2 Hyper-V virtual machine (that’s running on the home server) to connect to despite downgrading the NTLM authentication. I would have expected this to have been the other way around if this was to be a problem, although I have NT running on old IBM ThinkPads and it’s generally been fine.

After grabbing the installation file for Netscape Navigator 3.04, I found NT 3.1 would tend to crash – a lot. It crashed while extracting the files, it later crashed during installation with Dr. Watson letting me know, and finally after getting it installed it would just crash just attempting to go into the settings to turn off JavaScript. Each time meant having to reset the VM.

I think your tutorial has merit (very clear) and should be moved to the tutorials section, though I do have a couple of concerns. I don't recognize your problem with the display driver. My own Win 3.1 VM is running using the same 'Super VGA 1024x768 256 Small' driver, and I didn't need to patch it to get it to work with VirtualBox's VESA interface. Can you provide a link to any discussion on these forums of that problem? Do you know the copyright status of the drivers and patch tools that you provide download links for? Site Moderator Posts: 25980 Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09 Primary OS: MS Windows 10 VBox Version: PUEL Guest OSses: Mostly XP.

Hi mpack, It was initially intended to post it on the tutorial selection but i had no rights to post there. I would appreciate it if you moved this post to the tutorial selection 1. I reinstalled windows 3.11 on a new VM to test if the standard svga that come with windows 3.11 work and i tested the unpatched svga.exe drivers which ara basicly the same drivers. But it simply doesn't work for me. I get the following error after loading: If you got them working without patching then i really like to know how and why it's working. I used the latest VirtualBox on a windows 7 host. It is dicussed in the following post: 2.

The vgapatch tool is free to use in any way: the svga.exe are drivers made by microsoft and to my understanding you may use them at any time with a legal copy of windows 3.11? Glijnos Posts: 3 Joined: 22. Aug 2012, 22:28. Glijnos wrote:1.

I reinstalled windows 3.11 on a new VM to test if the standard svga that come with windows 3.11 work and i tested the unpatched svga.exe drivers which ara basicly the same drivers. But it simply doesn't work for me. It's not expected to. The driver from Microsoft only works with specific SVGA chips, none of which VirtualBox emulates. The only generic option is the 800x600 resolution available in Windows NT and at least some Windows 3.x versions; however, that is 16-color planar VGA and therefore slow. Oracle Corporation Posts: 2869 Joined: 19. Dec 2007, 15:45 Primary OS: MS Windows 7 VBox Version: PUEL Guest OSses: Any and all.

Kuato wrote:they work great with the exception of MSIE 5 (at least that's all I've noticed so far). Does anyone know of a fix for this?

Oracle Corporation

The fix would have to come from Microsoft - only they can write their code to give up more idle time. A possible workaround would be to set a cap on CPU for that VM (see VM settings System Processor) - though a caveat is that while I know the feature exists, I've never needed to use it so can't say much about it, even whether it works.

Site Moderator Posts: 25980 Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09 Primary OS: MS Windows 10 VBox Version: PUEL Guest OSses: Mostly XP. I have a WFW 3.11 installation in VirtualBox 4.1.8 on a Win 7 Pro host. Everything is working great except for.the SVGA display in 256 colors. Actually, anything SVGA driver resolution (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768) in 256 color mode isn't displayed correctly.

However, the only 16 color modes, SVGA 800x600 and the default VGA driver, are displayed perfectly. For the 256 color modes, the left half of the Windows image is stretched to cover the screen completely. When I change to any 256 color mode and Windows restarts, there's a brief time at startup when the wallpaper is displayed correctly (non-stretched).

I've followed the directions given earlier in this post regarding the SVGA driver, and still no joy. Anyone have any ideas? I'd really like to get the 1024x768 resolution working. Just playing with that theses days. By chance I had a ms win3.1 virtual machine I created long time ago with a «nice» screen.

When I tried again, I got the same screen as yours (almost twice as lage as expected). I noticed (almost by accident that if, from windows you go to MS-DOS mode (the MS-DOS icon on the main group) and then type exit the windows screen is from now correctly displayed. (MS Magic probably) I compared the system.ini of the two machines and after two hours of trials and errors discovered that changing (manualy by editing the file) the EnableSharing=Yes in the network section into EnableSharing=No solved the problem.

Don't ask me why. Hope this helps. Jean-Pierre aka FrenchGuy Posts: 1 Joined: 25. May 2013, 13:33.