Warp 4 boot issue (country.sys) with 2nd hard drive

[Von]

Hi All,

This is my first post to this group.  I fired up my museum computer that is an ASUS PSB-S board with a Celeron slocket in it.  The system has 2 drives in it and OS/2 Warp v4 (14.062_W4) is installed on a SCSI drive. That drive has other OSes on it and Partition Magic's Boot Magic controls what boots. When OS/2 is selected, I am pretty sure that Boot Magic hides the other partitions.  Now, this is all working fine except when I power up the other drive in the machine...it is an IDE drive with multiple OSes on it too. When I toggle the board's BIOS to boot to SCSI with the IDE drive powered, OS/2 stops it boot and throws this error:

The system cannott find the file  C:\OS2\SYSTEM\COUNTRY.SYS specified in teh COUNTRY statement on line 35 of the CONFIG.SYS.
Line 35 is ignored.
The system is stopped. Correct the preceding error and restart the system.

The system will not boot unless the IDE drive is unplugged...

Line 35 of config.sys is:
COUNTRY=001,C:\OS2\SYSTEM\COUNTRY.SYS

When I open COUNTRY.SYS it looks like this it looks like a page of code. I will try and figure out how to get an image loaded in this forum...

My question is, is the country.sys file needed? Could I delete that line out of config.sys to fix the problem?  Or is there a way to rebuild that file so that the computer can be used with both drives active?

THx!

TC

[Dave Yeo]

Hi TC, welcome.
I think the problem is actually OS/2 is getting confused about the drive letters. OS/2 ver 4 and older use the same hardwired drive lettering as DOS, 1st primary on HD0 is C:, 1st Primary on HD1 is D: etc. At some point during the boot, OS/2 gets confused, thinks that your IDE drive is HD0 and that is where C: is and can't find its device drivers starting with country.sys. If you removed it from config.sys, the next driver would fail to load.
I don't have experience with SCSI or mixed systems so not sure the best solution is. If you don't need to access the IDE drive, you could try remming out the BASEDEV=IBMS506.ADD line so that IDE drives aren't seen.
Better might be rearranging config.sys. Guessing, your SCSI drivers should come before IBMS506.ADD. You might want to post the relevant part of config.sys.
Others with more experience may have better ideas.
Don't delete stuff like country.sys in config.sys to attempt to fix.

[Von]

THx for this Dave. I made an edit to the config sys with a ";" which I thought was the same as "rem" it it looked like this:

; BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD

Note that mine and a "1" after "IBM". With this edit boot stopped with this error:

SYS1195: The statement ";" on line 46 of the CONFIG.SYS file is not recognized. Line 47 is ignored.
Press Enter to continue...

Pressing Enter resumed boot and the OS loaded AND the IDE drive was powered up.  I think if I replace ";" with "rem" I should not get that error and the pause in boot.

I will post the contents of the config.sys file tomorrow for suggestions on where to move that statement so that it does not need to be suppressed.

THx again for you help!

[Dave Yeo]

Yes, you need to use rem rather then anything else.
Sorry for the typo, going by memory.
Possibly moving it to the end would be good enough.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hey TC,

...The system has 2 drives in it and OS/2 Warp v4 (14.062_W4) is installed on a SCSI drive. That drive has other OSes on it and Partition Magic's Boot Magic controls what boots...

I think Dave is right on the money, OS/2 is probably getting confused about the drives and what drive letters are being assigned to them.

Here is another suggestion, I think this should work since the functionality I am about to describe was introduced with Warp4. Using the LVM manager you will be able to assign a drive letter to a disk partition. Now, there have always been problems between OS/2 and other OSes, mostly Windows stuff, where the OS/2 assignments would occasionally get messed up. Still, on my machine I have a total of 3 drives, with multiple partitions each...regardless, my OS/2 boot partition is drive G:\, works without any problems. Once assigned, that letter never goes away from within OS/2...so if you flag a partition as C:\, it will remain that within OS/2.

Be carefull of course, the last thing you want to do is to completely lock yourself out...having a maintenance boot partition goes a long way to helping out with such issues though.

[Dave Yeo]

No LVM in Warp v4 and I don't think there is a simple legal way to add it, so basically left with fdisk and hard wired drive letters.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

No LVM in Warp v4 ...

Yikes...well, I stand corrected then...I've been running OS/2 since ohhh about '92 or thereabouts....maybe '93, whenever Warp3 was out if I remember correctly. At some point in time LVM arrived and it made for a tremendous improvement in how a storage device could be managed.

[Von]

Here is my update...I tried moving the suggested line right after an entry that looked like the SCSI driver but that failed...using "rem" in place of ";" worked but boot still failed. I then tried moving the suggested line to the end of the config.sys and that worked fine and I could see the FAT partitions on the IDE drive.

THx for the input all.

[ak120]

Here is my update...I tried moving the suggested line right after an entry that looked like the SCSI driver but that failed...using "rem" in place of ";" worked but boot still failed. I then tried moving the suggested line to the end of the config.sys and that worked fine and I could see the FAT partitions on the IDE drive.

That's the behaviour by design. The device enumeration depends on the order of adapter device drivers in CONFIG.SYS. You can also add the Extended partition support (http://service.software.ibm.com/os2dd/free/extpart/expartw4.exe) to Warp 4 to improve the compatibility with Win95/NT partition schemes.