Installing NetWare 4.11 (HDD > 8 GB)

Yes, this is a post about an operating system that is no longer supported. Look, I'm an old Novell fan, and a NetWare fan for that matter. NetWare just does things right, especially for file & print. Today, even with all of the pricey glitter and sparkle on the new OSes, NetWare still rocks and can do so at a fraction of the hardware required. I remember running NetWare 4.11 servers with 16 MB of RAM (try doing that Windows ... don't think so). I'll stop now before I get too carried away with nostalgia.

I found an old HP box laying around the house. And, instead of throwing it away like the wife wanted, I decided to turn it into a NetWare 4.11 server. The box has 128 MB of RAM, a single 13 GB hard drive. Hey, that will make a nice little server for storing ... well, I don't know what I'll store, but it will make a nice little server. Heck, 128 MB of RAM in a 4.11 box will be more than enough to get some crazy speed out of it. This should be a screaming box for my home.

Now, before you say, "It only runs IPX," know this; I don't care. The box isn't going to be connected to the internet and will only be accessible from inside the house, so it's no big deal. And, if you've ever used IPX before (for file storage), you know it's quick. IPX in combination with the traditional NetWare file system ... speed ... speed ... speed. I don't see a downside here.

It's been a while since I've installed 4.11, so when I couldn't get the CD to boot the box, I had to go digging through my stuff and find a DOS boot disk. MS-DOS 6.22 sprung to mind as the latest from Microsoft and it should work just fine with 4.11. I do remember that Win95/98 boot disks had problems with NetWare ... so I'll stick with the tried and true here. I figured that I had to manually create a DOS partition with FDISK and use FORMAT to format it with the system files. Ok, fine I can do that. However, I couldn't find a stupid boot disk. I dug through some of my old computer things and found some 3.5" diskettes; one good one was all I needed.

After looking around the internet for 5 minutes, I found this site:

http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html

Under the "Automatic Boot Disk" label, I selected Dos6.22.exe. Once download, I inserted a floppy (yes, I still have a computer with a 3.5" floppy drive), double-clicked the EXE and it did everything for me. Presto! Instant MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk. The nice thing about this boot disk is that it contained everything that I think is necessary for a boot disk to have like a cdrom driver already configured in the config.sys and autoexec.bat, deltree.exe, format, fdisk, edit, attrib, etc., etc., etc. It was perfect. Kudos for the guys that put this version together. Well done.

So with my brand new boot disk I headed back to the computer and attempted to install NetWare 4.11 again confident it would work. The computer booted up, loaded DOS, found the CDROM (made it the R: drive) and life was good. After using fdisk and format (what a blast to use those utilities again, like format c: /s -- brought back some great memories), I rebooted the computer and now C:\ had everything I needed (don't forget to comment out himem.sys in the config.sys - NetWare doesn't like memory managers like that or emm386.exe).

I switched over to R: and typed "install" and the installation was off and running. Everything was working fine until it came to the creation of a NetWare partition. I like doing installs manually, I don't want the install to automatically pick anything for me. I wanted to create a 2 GB SYS volume and use the remaining space for a DATA volume. At least, that was the plan when I started.

Through some trial and error I found that if I used IDEATA.HAM for the driver (NetWare detects and automatically uses this ... a version from 1996) that when it loads IDEHD.CDM (also a version from 1996), the DOS partition on the box becomes inaccessible. This caused errors for NetWare where it couldn't load CDROM.NLM, or ICDM.NLM or any number of other things and the install ground to a halt. I could not type "load c:\nwserver\cdrom.nlm" because it couldn't find the file (which is bull, because I know the file is there). When I exit out to DOS and do a directory listing, it looks like the entire nwserver directory is messed up ... funny characters for file names, etc. Kind of a pain. However, reboot the box, check the directory in DOS again and everything looks great. Weird. I ran chkdsk /f, and even scandisk to look for problems. I didn't find any.

So I switched to IDE.DSK from the IDEATA HAM driver, and that problem went away. At this point the install continued and cdrom loaded, icdm loaded; it started working properly. However, I know the DSK model is outdated and was replaced by the HAM/CDM model, so something's going on here. The problem now that I found is that NetWare did not recognize anything more than 8 GB for IDE disks. Okay, not so great. I finished the install, just to test it out, and everything worked fine.

After applying Support Pack 9, I could now see the entire 13 GB disk (8 GB partitioned up, and 5 GB free); however, because NetWare only allows one partition per device, I was stuck with what I had. Not good. Fdisk, format, and try again; this time looking for a real solution to install NetWare 4.11 on a single device EIDE drive greater than 8 GB.

Here's what I found:

1. You need to get the IDEHD.CDM from 4.11 Support Pack 8a. (Version 2.00.01 Tuesday, October 27, 1998). The one from Support Pack 9 will not work without more effort (Version 3.00.01 Thursday, May 18, 2000), because it requires an updated NWPA. Version 2.0 and above support extended IDE drive sizes greater than 8 GB. Which is exactly what I want.

I also included IDEATA.HAM, IDEATA.DDI, IDEHD.DDI, IDECD.CDM, and IDECD.DDI in the set of modules I copied. I wanted to be complete and sure that nothing weird would happen if I just pulled one driver over and not another.

2. Copy all of these files to either a diskette, or place them on the C: drive in a directory of your choosing. I decided that c:\drivers was good enough for me.

3. When the install starts and auto-detects the hardware, let it choose everything, but do not let it load anything. Switch out to the server console prompt and load the version of IDEHD.CDM you put in the c:\drivers directory. This one should be loaded first so that when IDEATA loads, it will not have to auto-load the CDM from sys:system (which could be the older version from 1996 and cause issues). After the CDM, load up the HAM driver (IDEATA.HAM). This just ensures that the later drivers are loaded first before the versions that cause issues.

4. I made of point of removing the versions of the drivers that NetWare 4.11 shipping code comes with during the install, and pointing the install to c:\drivers to get the newer/updated version. This is all done through the C-Worthy interface by just deleting the selected driver and then adding a new one. I chose the driver location to scan to be c:\driver and then selected the IDEATA driver. Simple. I'm not sure this step was necessary, but I did it anyway.

At this point with the correct drivers loaded NetWare would let me configure the full 13 GB drive. I partitioned up a 2 GB SYS volume and an 11 GB DATA volume. The install completed successfully from that point on. I upgraded it to Support Pack 9, and everything works fine now.

Now, if the install drive were IDE and <= 8 GB, then none of this would matter. If you have a second drive and it is greater than 8 GB, just install 4.11 Support Pack 9 and the drivers to enable >8 GB support will be installed and INSTALL will be able to carve up the disks just fine. Or, if the drive in the box is SCSI, then these are hoops you don't need to worry about.

Happy Novell-ing. :)