Author Topic: OS/2 4.0 Blue Box  (Read 4540 times)

RickCHodgin

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OS/2 4.0 Blue Box
« on: November 20, 2018, 10:47:55 pm »
I have OS/2 Warp 4 that I bought back in the day.  I've installed it previously on various machines.  Here in the past couple of weeks I've tried installing it on two old PCs I've been given to replace my desktop machine that had a capacitor explode.

On both machines the Installation diskette boots, I go through disks 1 and 2 and then it kicks in and reads the CD-ROM.  I'm able to partition the drive and install the OS, but on both machines, despite several attempts, changing LBA to CHS, creating partitions as small as ~400 MB, I can't get the actual OS isntall to boot from the hard disk.

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?  It doesn't give an error.  The hard disk light flashes, and then it just hangs.

I have 4.52 and will try that, but I'll need to get it burned to a CDR/W as I only have DVD-RW right now and my old machines only have CD-ROM drives.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: OS/2 4.0 Blue Box
« Reply #1 on: November 21, 2018, 12:35:51 am »
The standard OS/2 Warp 4 diskettes are limited to a 4 GB hard drive. You'll need to update the drivers on diskette 1 and add SET COPYFROMFLOPPY=1 to config.sys. With up-to-date drivers, you can install on up to a 2 TB hard drive.
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RickCHodgin

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Re: OS/2 4.0 Blue Box
« Reply #2 on: November 21, 2018, 12:54:48 am »
The standard OS/2 Warp 4 diskettes are limited to a 4 GB hard drive. You'll need to update the drivers on diskette 1 and add SET COPYFROMFLOPPY=1 to config.sys. With up-to-date drivers, you can install on up to a 2 TB hard drive.

That's probably it. The hard drive is ~40 GB.

I was able to get 4.52 installed.  It installed and boots up fine.  The PS/2 mouse doesn't work for some reason.  When I got the machine it had MS-DOS and WIN 98 SE and it worked.  When I run Ubuntu 7.04 from a liveboot CD or on a partition on the same machine it works fine.

RickCHodgin

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Re: OS/2 4.0 Blue Box
« Reply #3 on: November 21, 2018, 04:31:20 am »
I was able to get 4.52 installed.  It installed and boots up fine.  The PS/2 mouse doesn't work for some reason.

I'm not sure what happened.  I plugged in a USB mouse (that mimics PS/2 through BIOS) and it worked.  Then I un-plugged my PS/2 mouse and plugged it back in and now it's working.  I guess 5th time unplugging and re-plugging in is the charm. :-)

I was able to get my partitions setup.  One OS/2, one IBM PC DOS 7, and one each for ES/1 and ES/2.  I was able to recover my previous development drive and copy over the developer environment and prior source code (see http://www.libsf.org:8990/projects/LIB/repos/libsf/browse/es2/ES1 and other folders under es2/) and get my prior code running once I tweaked the VESA video mode.  This one supports 1400 x 1050 with 16-bit color on the monitor I have for that machine.

I may need to change my video card though.  The one I have now doesn't do 132 column text modes, and I can't handle 80 column text modes.  Other than that, it's a good machine.
« Last Edit: November 21, 2018, 04:33:57 am by Rick C. Hodgin »

RickCHodgin

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Re: OS/2 4.0 Blue Box
« Reply #4 on: November 21, 2018, 05:09:24 am »
I've gone to 3dfx voodoo3 2000, which supports 132x50 and 132x60 in hardware VESA video modes.