"cannot operate the hard disk"...seems familiar, right?

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

...except that what I'm seeing is a bit weird, let me explain.

I have an OS/2 4.52 box here, currently installed on a Samsung 850 Evo 250G SSD, with the following layout:
1) Boot Manager - 7M
2) Maintenance - 54M
3) OS/2 - 233G

Recently I bought a Samsung 860 Evo SSD, but a 500G size, idea being to just toss everything onto that single partition.

Normally in the past when I made the moves between different drives, or from a HD to a SSD, I simply xcopied the drive contents, swapped the drive letters and off I went booting from the NEW drive.

There may have been the occasional sysinstx needed, but never ran into a problem.

Now this time around I'm seeing something strange. I use DANI drivers (latest ones) and the AOS JFS drivers (1.09.09), including the most recent fix to the cache issue. These updates have been pushed out to my main OS/2 boot drive as well as the Maintenance partition.

So I make a copy of the MAINT partition, swap the drive letters and attempt to boot into that partition from within Boot Manager menu. Strangely enough the OS/2 boot starts but soon after the DANI drivers get loaded I get the "cannot operate the hard disk" error message, the boot stops.

Strange, but alright I thought maybe I'm running into some sort of issue with the larger drive???

I re-booted back to my main OS/2 partition, brought up LVM, checked things out to make sure all was good, and it was. I then went ahead and re-booted back into the MAINT partition...lo and behold, all of a sudden my MAINT partition booted just fine.

THE ONLY difference here is that I booted into the main OS/2 partition, fired up LVM, checked things and re-booted back to the previously non-bootable MAINT partition.

I thought this was super weird...I went ahead and replicated this several times, each time exactly the same behaviour:
1) swap drive letters
2) attempt to boot the MAINT partition - FAIL
3) boot into the main OS/2 boot partition
4) shut down and re-boot into the Boot Manager menu to select the MAINT partition
5) MAINT partition successfully boots

Ugh???

What gives here? Is there something off with the MBR on the MAINT partition maybe??? Do I need to update the MBR? This behaviour just doesn't make sense to me, but I'm hoping I'm just missing something that others have seen...

Thanks!

[Pete]

Hi Dariusz

Looks like the drive letter could be getting changed...

Do you have both SSDs connected? - try disconnecting the 250Gb to test.


Regards

Pete

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hi Pete,

...Looks like the drive letter could be getting changed...

Well, following the drive letter change in LVM I always double-check. Sometimes that happens after a re-boot (funny thing is that my OS/2 boot partition LVM will allow the letter change w/o needed a re-boot, but the MAINT partition insists that I re-boot with CTL-ALT-DEL right away).

Anyways, the newly picked letter sticks, meaning it is correctly assigned each time before I actually attempt to boot from that MAINT partition.

...Do you have both SSDs connected? - try disconnecting the 250Gb to test...

No, I have not tried that, worth a try though. In fact I really should get myself a working CD/DVD/USB based boot in case I ever get into this kind of a situation where neither one of the drives is bootable...LOL!