Ackart

the windows NT 4 install process contains a tripping hazard so profound that i'm surprised joel spolsky never wrote a blog post about it

after you boot the installer from CD, it copies files to your hard drive, but for some reason it doesn't copy over a boot sector. instead it has you make three floppy disks. this is very odd, but whatever.

here's the problem: they're labeled 3, 2, Boot. that is to say, the first onscreen prompt says:

and the last one says

the intent is probably so that when you're done, the boot disk is in your drive instead of disk 3. that way when you pick restart without reading what's on the screen that says to take the disk out, you don't get a "non system disk" error. clever, except:

every person who had touched a computer more than once would make it a third of the way through this message, then go "oh, it's a series of disks," and grab a blank and write "1" on it. then of course the next message says 2, so even if you read it everything seems to be fine. the final one says "Boot Disk", but nobody alive would be reading the screen at this point; you're obviously going to be reading a book and waiting for the disk to stop grinding to put in the next one.

as a result, you can be assured that every single set of NT4 install floppies in existence is labeled backwards and outright wrong, so when the installer asks you to put in "Boot", what you want is the one labeled "3." clear as mud!

this also means that if they are labeled correctly then you're standing there with disks called "2" and "3", and no "1". IBM of course "solved" this: OS/2 Warp 4 requires three floppies, but they labeled them Install, 1 and 2. which of course means if you're standing there with disks labeled 1 and 2, you're going to assume you have at least the first disks in the set. what happens if you put disk 1 in your machine and try to boot?

you get the above messages, and then have to go find the two-inch-thick paper manual and look them up. i should note that this is 34 characters, which is exactly long enough to fit the string "Please insert the "Install" disk."

We fixed it!