Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia

https://blog.pizzabox.computer/posts/booting-the-multia/

by fanf2 • 8 years ago

160 58 8 years ago

blog.pizzabox.computer

13of403• 8 years ago

"My understanding of this procedure is that I would mount the hard drive on another computer and match the Administrator password hash to a known password"

For future reference, all you need to do is temporarily replace services.exe with an exe that runs "net user administrator xyz123" (to change the password to xyz123), then reboot. Then put the original services.exe back, of course.

mschuster91• 8 years ago

... which would require getting your hands on a toolchain able to compile for this decades-old Windows on a pretty rare architecture.

13of403• 8 years ago

Not really. This is pre-ASLR, so all you need to do is push a string pointer on the stack and call an address. Probably less than 15 bytes of machine code you'd need to hex-edit into an existing exe.

poizan42• 8 years ago

Like gcc[0] or Visual C++[1]?

[0] https://virtuallyfun.com/2016/12/09/gcc-windows-nt-dec-alpha...

[1] https://winworldpc.com/product/visual-c/6x

nitrogen• 8 years ago

It's also possible that the Linux chntpw utility might be able to change the password in the old registry file directly.

13of403• 8 years ago

I believe the format of either the registry hives or the the way the password hash is stored changed between Win2K and WinXP, so a modern tool likely wouldn't work. That's why you can use a Windows 2000 CD to boot to a recovery console in later windows versions without a password: It thinks the registry is corrupt and skips authentication.

djsumdog2• 8 years ago

I remember playing with a MSDN copy of Win NT 3.51 in my cousin's cubical back at AMI in the late 90s. We had NT4 on a Pentium Pro I got to admin back in high school. I even tried to see if I could get the library computers to login off a Samba PDC instead of the NT4 Server. A lot of stuff didn't work, and group policies were pretty janky.

I like how the author also has an SGI and two Sun machines next to this one. We got a hold of some old Sun Stations in University back in 2001; paid like $12 for a crate of them. They were made in the 80s and had dual 100MB SCSI hard drives, tons of ram slots (I want to say 32 or 64MB of potential ram), and those crazy optical mice that needed the grid based mouse pads. I think I got RedHat running on mine and didn't do much with it.

I'd love to collect and work on old stuff like this, but I started to do some hard core backpacking in my 30s and my parents threw out nearly everything while I was over seas for a few years. I'd really like to stay minimal with a room full or less of stuff, so I don't see myself getting into old computing any time soon. I'll just read posts like this and read The 8-Bit guy to get that nostalgia fix.

Oh and if you're ever in Seattle and love old machines, check out The Living Computer Museum. They have actual Altos, HP UX, TIs, Apples, and DEC Alpha machines you can log into and play with. It's pretty amazing.

an_account_name• 8 years ago

The Living Computer Museum is indeed fantastic. I’m partial to the mainframes but my daughter hates the loud noise in the cold room so we spend more time playing old PC games.

lukeh• 8 years ago

Group policies were introduced with Windows 2000 and Active Directory.

djsumdog2• 8 years ago

Sorry, I meant System Policies, the predecessors to Group Policies.

maxerickson• 8 years ago

I knew someone who had a DEC running Windows NT around 2000. They admitted it didn't work as well as they would have liked.

Maarten88• 8 years ago

NT 4 prepared Win32 for synchronization with Windows 95. I hated it for that: they moved the presentation layer into the kernel (to allow features like "Active Desktop" widgets) which negatively impacted reliability and security for years to come.

Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5 were much more reliable. The CD-ROM's containing the OS from MSDN came with the Microsoft C/C++ compiler on it, somewhere they even added Visual Studio 1.0.

There was hardly any client software for MIPS and Alpha, but the i386 versions ran 16 bit versions of Ami Pro, Excel and Mosaic well. Which is probably why MIPS and Alpha NT versions never became popular, despite the fact that they were very fast for the time.

yuhong2• 8 years ago

win32k has nothing to do with active desktop which was mostly shell level.

JonathonW• 8 years ago

Windows 95 and NT 4 didn't even ship with Active Desktop-- it (along with IE integration into Windows Explorer) was added as part of the Windows Desktop Update that shipped with IE4, and didn't become part of the OS out of the box until Windows 98 (and 2000 on the NT series).

GDI in the kernel (win32k.sys) was a performance optimization.

gh02t• 8 years ago

Alpha NT didn't become popular because of price and compatibility. DEC wanted to sell Alpha in serious workstations and servers and only made some half-hearted attempts to target the consumer market. Meanwhile the consumer marker coalesced around Wintel and Intel could leverage that larger volume to reduce costs, while consumers were locked in to x86 for compatibility.

Dunno much about the history of MIPS but I imagine it was a similar story. Once Windows on x86 hit critical mass it steamrolled the rest. PowerPC was the exception with Apple, but even they didn't really start biting into bigger market shares until they switched. The dominance wasn't technically motivated (I know at least Alpha and SPARC had superior performance in many areas), it was economics and compatibility (and some shady dealings).

Fnoord2• 8 years ago

All the RISC architectures had superior performance over x86-32 in the '90s.

MIPS is much larger than SGI, and POWER [1] is much larger than PPC (or Apple). MIPS and POWER have been used in consoles, for example. That is volume! Especially MIPS, is used in embedded chips (together with predominantly ARM). Those are found on every mainboard, laptop, console even though the latest gen consoles run on AMD64.

Alpha however, died somewhere within DEC/Compaq/HP.

My friend argued the NSA was using Alpha processors internally, and had their own fab. I have no clue about that though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Architecture

flomo2• 8 years ago

NT 3.x was mainly pushed as a server OS targeting Novell Netware. On the PC side it never made sense unless you bought one of these discount surplus Multias.

I worked at a F500 and two times DEC reps came into sell NT/Alpha, and both occasions, they couldn't get the machines to boot. I wonder how much of that NT/Alpha just for marketing, because DEC was selling a lot of x86 servers in those days.

The Pentium Pro 200Mhz was better than or close-enough to RISC processors in most standard benchmarks that most businesses seem to decide "good enough", and that was the beginning of the end of the end of the server processor wars.

rjsw• 8 years ago

NT 3.x was fine for a desktop OS. I ran both on Pentium machines as my development system.

flomo2• 8 years ago

Whatever point I thought I was trying to make came out the completely wrong way, so for anyone looking at my post history, I was drunk and disavow this comment.

fanf2• 8 years ago

I had a pet Pentium Pro server in about 1999, and it was a fantastic machine. Excellent CPU performance and a fast IO system to match.

tonyedgecombe• 8 years ago

they moved the presentation layer into the kernel

That was a nightmare, I remember opening a printer queue on a server at one customer and it instantly blue screened the machine. I'd only been on site for five minutes before I had to go and apologise to the customer.

mrbill2• 8 years ago

I ran NT4 on a MIPS Magnum R4000 for a while. It worked okay. Could run 16bit x86 Windows/DOS stuff in a weird sort of translation/emulation.

All my Multias (I owned 2-3 over the years) usually ended up with RHEL on them; nobody in the nerd crowd I was in wanted to run Windows on them. They ran so hot that if you sat it horizontal it would keep your coffee cup warm if close enough.

I believe someone got VMS running on one after some hackery with the firmware/BIOS.

michrassena2• 8 years ago

I bought an Acer PICA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_PICA) back in the early 2000s, obsolete by then, just to play with it and Windows NT 4. MIPS still seemed exotic, and there was little free software to use on the platform. I think a port of Office existed, and maybe an early Internet Explorer.

I'm not sure what the point of the ARC ports of NT even were, except Microsoft's attempt to keep its fingers in as many pies as possible and crowd out competitors.

mrbill2• 8 years ago

They weren't sure if x86 was going to be competitive in the long run at that point, so they were porting to all the major architectures. I even heard rumors of a SPARC port of NT 3.51 but I've never seen it in the flesh.

Solaris even ported to PPC (specific RS6K boxes) for Solaris 2.5.1; I've got a copy of that ISO image around somewhere but never had the right hardware to run it.

ben1040• 8 years ago

I realized the only other time I'd heard of the Multia was from Slashdot posts from nearly 20 years ago.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/99/08/02/0219235/free-multia...

dmeeker• 8 years ago

PSA: don't click the link to the linux store in the Slashdot article. Someone super dodgy owns that domain name now.

walrus012• 8 years ago

I remember seeing NT3.5 running on an Alpha at a trade show around the same time period. A higher end model than the one the author posts here. The reason why it never found "consumer success" is that in late 1993 dollars it cost $7800 , equivalent to about $13,600 today. When at the same time it was possible to buy a 486DX/33 for just under $2000 in a pretty decent, though not nearly as capable configuration. That is what consumers could afford.

miah_• 8 years ago

In ~1997 I bought a Multia off some online auction site pre-Ebay. My local PC supplier had to special order 64MB ECC RAM for me as they didn't carry it. For a teenager at my first IT job it took me a few months to afford the RAM and was a bit before I had it running. I mainly used it beta testing Redhat Rawhide and experimenting with Linux. It was my first non-x86 system.

I did try WindowsNT 4.0 on it for a week, but it was slow and almost nothing was compatible with it.

Later I got some Alphastations but they were almost the same spec as a Multia, just better form factor.

My main PC around this time was a Sun Sparcstation 20 with a ROSS Dual Hypersparc module and 2GB RAM. I remember paying around $2000 for it in 1998, probably too much! Unfortunately the magic smoke escaped from the CPU one morning in 2000 :(

projektfu2• 8 years ago

Not bad for the SPARC considering it was introduced at around $25,000. Of course, by 1998 it was only as powerful as a dual processor Pentium Pro. I think the RAM maxed out at 512MB though.

jibanes• 8 years ago

I did my thesis (and wrote code on) a sparcstation lx running an (very) early version of openbsd/sparc.

Paianni• 8 years ago

This isn't SPARC, it's Alpha.

qplex• 8 years ago

Holy crap that's a lot of RAM for 1998.

I hit 2GB about 10 years later when I got a Core2Duo workstation.

walrus012• 8 years ago

I think OP is mistaken, 512 MB was max in a sparcstation 20. Unless they were working at LLNL or Brookhaven Labs on something very special affording 2GB of ram in a 1997 desktop workstation would have been nearly impossible to justify financially. And probably wouldn't have been a sun, it would have been a $35,000 SGI. Such as a Onyx or Onyx2, or Challenge. Something r4400 based.

mkesper• 8 years ago

The article mentions Service Pack 6. You needed to install 6a which fixed up many faults of 6, like e.g. not being able to disable Nagle's algorithm for TCP (not funny when you wanted to send around short TCP messages).

hestefisk• 8 years ago

This brings back so many fond memories from the late 90ies. I dual booted Windows NT 4 and Red Hat Linux for many years on an old Pentium 166 with an Adaptec scsi controller (remember that?). It was wonderful. Could never afford an Alpha machine though. WinNT was good stuff, miss the good old blue boot screen.

Fnoord2• 8 years ago

Yeah I remember having a server with an Adaptec SCSI controller. It only booted with Linux 2.4. When we attempted to boot Linux 2.6 I had to drive 300 km to the datacenter to fix it. "trying harder", it printed. Fun stuff.

other_herbert• 8 years ago

I messed around with one of these I got in college at an off lease / salvage type place... The boot loader on those was really cool and because it was an alpha, you had a license for digital UNIX...

ecopoesis• 8 years ago

I had an Alpha Multia back in ‘98. I remember having to scour eBay for the appropriate SCSI adapters since DEC used something proprietary. And even with the adapter, I never got the Linuxes of the time to recognize the HDs.

The key to running NT4 for Alpha was DEC’s FX!32. It crosscompiled x86 code to AXP. Thanks to Alpha’s better design this made my 233mhz 21066 a lot faster running x86 code the my Pentium MMX 233.

jdwithit• 8 years ago

As a kid who grew up in Massachusetts in the 80s and 90s, I'd love to go back in time and experience the competing tech that was being built in my back yard before the west coast totally won out. I had friends whose parents worked for both DEC and Wang Laboratories, and had those companies' gear in their homes. At the time I only cared about what games you could put on or write for them, but it would be awesome to poke around on them again as an adult.

Jaruzel• 8 years ago

Finding software written for Win32/Alpha, though, is likely to be a challenge.

As someone who actually had one of these at work[1] back in the early 90s, there was hardly any software compiled for Alpha even when it was a current product. Lack of software support, was one of the reasons that WinNT Alpha never gained a foothold. Which was a shame as the Alpha hardware was pretty great.

[1] It was the only one we had, I think we got it as a freebie as the rest of the computer room was choca full of DEC VAXs.

randomerr2• 8 years ago

I remember a local college loved them because you could teach 3d modeling. They really weren't used for the actual modelling but rather as cheap render farms that could run at night.

gaius• 8 years ago

there was hardly any software compiled for Alpha even when it was a current product

I ran SQL Server on NT on Alpha in the 90s, it was actually very good, but you had to treat it as a dedicated appliance rather than a general-purpose computer because as you say, there was very little software available.

Then the industry took a weird meander through DEC StrongARM and now Microsoft is looking at Windows on ARM seriously again...

youdontknowtho• 8 years ago

If I remember correctly there was something called FX32 that was like a dynamic transpiler from X86 to Alpha. You could run Win32 apps, and they would get faster over time as it cached translated binaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

randomerr2• 8 years ago

I miss the simplicity of the NT / 2003 era of servers. You could make setup as simple or as complex as you now. Now you have to have a BSA to configure so many arbitrary standards just to connect to a NAS.

aap_• 8 years ago

I have Windows 2000 RC2 running on an Alpha :) It's really neat, you can even execute x86 programs.

paulirwin2• 8 years ago

So at the time, to compile software for Windows NT Alpha, was there an Alpha IDE and compiler available (something like VC++) such that developers were writing and debugging locally, or would developers usually cross-compile from an x86 machine?

paulirwin2• 8 years ago

To answer my own question, now that I'm not on my mobile: it looks like there was an Alpha version of Visual C++ 2.0, as well as a cross-compiler for the 68k Macintosh! [1] I was firmly in VB land at the time (as a ~10 year old) so this bit of history eluded me.

[1] https://accu.org/index.php/journals/1771

drewg123• 8 years ago

I had an alpha (miata, AKA Personal Workstation 500au, I think) running NT on my desk for a while, while we waited for space to open up in a rack..(1) The NT on it seemed quite usable, thanks to the FX!32 emulator. When running x86 compiled stuff, it felt mostly as fast as contemporary high-end PCs, once you'd opened the x86 program and used it for a while.

(1) We used FreeBSD/alpha, so we always bought the "NT" version of machines to save $$$ on the DEC UNIX license fee. Eg, just like today, the Windows version of a machine was cheaper.. FreeBSD did not support the ARC firmware needed by NT, but you could easily switch the machines to SRM in order to load FreeBSD.

Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia

Related Stories