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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

mid 90's, a friend of mine installed Windows NT to, and booted it from, a DAT tape

While not booted from, wimlib's support for pipable WIMs means through some shenanigans, you can install modern Windows from tape. I had a bootstrap ISO that would fire up Windows PE, mount my USB DAT tape drive, rewind it, prep the onboard storage, then image direct from tape to disk and make it bootable.

I posit that because wimlib supports pipable WIMs that we could pipe an endless stream of QR codes to it (thus making the "installing Windows from QR codes" possible)...

I got PTSD from installing Windows 95 from floppy and after 40 floppies getting read errors...

Somewhere in my parents' house there is a massive box with floppies for office 95 (or whatever it was called back then). Not 40 floppies massive, but still a large number.

I think we managed to only ever install it once successfully without error.

Also, fun semi-related fact: In my country we called 8" and 5.25" floppies "floppies", and the smaller 3.5" ones were called "stiffies" - because the larger ones were floppy, and the smaller were, well, stiffer. Do with this information as you please.

i need to know which country this is, please!

Certainly not the UK where inserting your stiffie in to something has rather a different connotation….

I'm going to wager South Africa based on this blog post: https://jasonelk.com/2015/12/who-knew-that-the-rest-of-the-w...

Happened also in Finland. It was "lerppu" (floppy) for the flexible ones and "korppu" (hard biscuit) for the hard ones.

South Africa!

My first IT job involved installing a lot of Windows 95 from floppy disk. Luckily each PC I bought came with a set, so I'd build up some "good sets" over time after discarding all the disks that had read errors.

The first time I installed SLS Linux (pre-Slackware), it took some 25 1.44MB floppies and I owned ~20 empty ones. I left the installer running overnight and downloaded more floppies the next day at school. It took an extra day because some floppies had bad sectors, and had to be re-downloaded..

How long did it take? Seek times for tapes can be minutes, so fragmentation matters a great deal here.

installation was more than overnight. once it was up and running, it was remarkably responsive, in the short run, but would invariably need to do a lot of seeking to launch any app. The sort of thing if you are sitting nearby you could give it some input every couple minutes.

I seem to recall some vendor (HP?) selling external tape drives at some point that supported bootable, bare metal Windows restore from tape.

I believe it worked by supplying the recovery software as a bootable ISO image in ROM on the drive and emulating a bootable (USB? SCSI?) CD-ROM drive at boot.

DAT tapes presented as disk drivers, sector addressable. and you can dump a .iso to a disk to make it bootable, so sounds right.

For some fringe use cases one could drop a readily installed (and defragmented!) OS image to the tape and boot it up. I've only had some floppy tape drives and parallel-port attached Ditto. They didn't support random access, or at least I never had a driver that could do that.

That must have been fun.

In the late 90s I worked in the server support line for DEC, and the number of times we had to talk people through the "invisible F6 prompt" was nuts.

can you explain?

If your intended system volume was going to require drivers that weren't built into WinNT, you needed to press F6 at a specific point during installation. This would allow you to load a driver that makes the volume visible / usable.

This process was specific to installing storage drivers needed for the system volume. All other driver installation happened elsewhere.

My memory says there was actually a "Press F6 to load system storage drivers" prompt or something displayed by the installer, but it wasn't displayed for all that long a time and I imagine it was effectively invisible for many people. I recall spamming F6 to make sure I wouldn't miss the prompt.

Actually there were two separate times during the installation process that you could press F6 to provide storage drivers. The first had no visible prompt! The second has the prompt you remember.

Here's how I remember it: The Windows CD itself had drivers built into the installer so that it could discover hardware. However, if you had a brand new storage controller, you might find that even Windows NT CD's installer wouldn't recognise it, so it would tell you that there were no storage devices found. To get around this you had to press F6 right at the start of the CD boot, before the Windows logo appeared. After a few seconds you could provide your storage drivers on a floppy disk, and the Windows installer program would continue to load. This time, the installer would recognise your disks. Then during the installation you would get a visible F6 prompt to provide your storage drivers. This allowed you to provide extra storage drivers that would be bundled with the installed OS.

Most people didn't know about the first F6, because I think NT installer had some sort of very basic, generic storage drivers that would work in most cases. If you had some very recent array controller, you would likely need to know about the "invisible F6 prompt".

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