Installing Netware 3.12 on VMWare

Bringing back the good old days of Netware 3.12 is one of the coolest things to do.

To Start:

Configure a virtual machine with access to the CDROM drive and with a virtual/plain disk that it can use to store its MS-DOS boot files  and its NetWare partition [which contains the SYS volume] configure in vm bios primary master DISK “LBA Mode Control” to DISABLE.

1)  Use a MS-DOS v6.x bootable floppy disk to get started.  Boot the virtual machine from the floppy disk.

2)  Manually create the DOS partition on the hard drive.  Format the partition, make it bootable and copy in the required MS-DOS files and
dosidle.exe modify autoexec.bat for dosidle autostart.

3)  Install Novell 3.12 how do you want, at question
“DO YOU WANT SPECIFY ANY SPECIAL STARTUP COMMANDS?” answer NO
“DO YOU WANT AUTOEXEC.BAT to load SERVER.EXE ?” answer NO
Now shutdown netware and go to dos (Write DOWN and after EXIT on console)

4) Copy the extract cdup5a.exe file in Novell Server.312 directory using xcopy.

5) create  C:\SERVER.312\STARTUP.NCF

LOAD PM312.NLM
LOAD NPAPATCH.NLM
SET AUTO REGISTER MEMORY ABOVE 16 MEGABYTES = OFF
SET RESERVED BUFFERS BELOW 16 MEG = 200
LOAD IDEATA PORT=1F0 INT=E

6)  Manually start SERVER.EXE, the system load the IDEATA.HAM driver, specifying the proper interrupt and I/O port information for the IDE
controllers in the VM.  the drive  load  twice to support emulated IDE devices on both the primary and secondary IDE adapters in the VM. Don’t worry about warning you need other library for silent warning

7)  Insert a file name server and an IPX network number

Load INSTALL.NLM  and manually create the NetWare partition(s) and the SYS volume.

8)  Once you have the SYS volume mounted, you can go about using INSTALL.NLM to copy the rest of the server files from the installation media.  I enabled CDROM support to do this and completed the installation using the CDROM mounted as a NetWare volume.  However, you
could leave a DOS CDROM driver and MSCDEX loaded and just access the installation CDROM via a drive letter such as D:.

9)  Uncompress odig33.exe and copy from FILE TO SERVER\33SPEC\312   MSM31X.NLM,NB31X.NLM
c:\server.312\SERVER\33SPEC     ETHERTSM.NLM
c:\server.312

after Copy pcntnw.lan e pcntw.ldi ( AMD Network Driver) in c:\server.312

Start server and add to AUTOEXEC.CNF

load c:\server.312\pcntnw slot=2 BIND IPX TO pcntnw NET=xxxx

10) copy nw4-idle.nlm in SYS:\SYSTEM and modify AUTOEXEC.CNF to load
nw4-idle.nlm

11) Install the follow patches in the order below:
312ptd, dig33, lib312d, 312y2kp2, clibaux1, ttsy2k, ldr312ft

11)  Be sure to get the NW4-IDLE.NLM file and load it on the 3.x server
to keep the VM from consuming 100% of the host CPU while the NetWare
server is idle.

I’ll have more on Netware 3.12 in the near future. I’ve just recently acquired a copy of Netware 3.2 Enhancement Pack!

_-=Cinsei=-_

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