OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Setup & Installation

Extremely slow Warp 4.52 installation.

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UberCoder:
SO...my activities for the evening, thus far:

I downloaded and booted from the DFSee floppy disk and deleted the pre-existing partition as suggested.
I then attempted to reinstall OS2 - this failed completely with some errors about a corrupted partition table. It was unable to build a new partiton.
I then booted into Dos and used Fdisk to create a new Primary Dos partition.
I then re-started the OS2 installation (without formatting the Dos partiton). Using the OS2 LVM, I was now able to successfully delete the Dos partition & create a new 'Installable' partition for OS2.
I am currently waiting for the OS2 installation process to get round to prompting me to select a format type, etc...Its not looking promising. Once again its running extremely slowly...

Just spotted RTAN's post and link to ClearHDD (thx). I've killed the install attempt (above) run ClearHDD on the machine & restarted the install. Partition creation passed uneventfully and I'm back back to waiting for the format type prompt, now. The the process does feel as if it's been running a little quicker...we'll see. 

I'll leave it to run over night, but if its still copying files tomorrow morning, I think I'll scrap the whole thing and see about trying to install eCS2.1.

UberCoder:
and here's the result....no change. If anything, its slower!

The more I think about it, I don't think its a disk/ide issue. Its more that the whole system is slow and any slow dis access is a by-product of that. However, I did a Win98se install as a comparison, earlier in the week, and it installed in around 30mins, so the machine itself is entirely functional.

All this leaves me at a loss...in 30+years of playing around with PCs both professionally and at home, I've never come across an OS install that appears to make no complaints, but just runs at small percentage (1%..? 5%..?) of what it should run at. It really feals like its runnnig at 4.5Mhz, rather than 450Mhz.

I think I'll try 1 last time, this time with a different HDD, and if that's not successful, I think I'll accept defeat.       

*UPDATE* 1st alternative HDD failed - BIOS didn't reccognise the CF <-> IDE adapter. moving on to try a 'real' HDD...   

*UPDATE 2* Annnnd no. Different HDD same problem. Switching to try my luck with eCS2.1...wish me luck! 

*UPDATE 3* And eComStation 2.1 doesn't work either...I suppose I should be grateful that it only tooK 2 hours to fail, rather than 2 days. Anyway, I'll start a new thread...

Thanks all for your input. 

P.

Lars:
Have you checked that (memory) caching is enabled in BIOS?
I seem to remember for old PCs that this could be turned off and on.

In general I would have a look at what the BIOS offers. There also sometimes existed something like a switch "OS Select For DRAM > 64MB" which you might need to turn OFF (weird, ain't it?).

If you have something like "cache BIOS" or "BIOS shadowing" then turn that OFF.  OS/2 does not make much use of the BIOS. Your system memory (and also memory cache) is better used for other things.

JTA:
This is a really old system, and I believe you are trying to boot a really old OS (if it's 4.52 stock) ... both of these are most likely out of sync with what you installed on it back in the day (warp 3, 4?).

If you were able to get 3 or 4 (or something) on it back then, then perhaps check to see if that can be repeated today, and then look into the upgrade processes to finally get to 4.52 plus fixes. This gets you to a known starting point. Save that image (for reload), and test in other directions ...

I'd think you need a more modern boot CD, such as in the links provided ... this is the only way I can think of to get all the fixes into place that have occurred over the years, for the installer routines. Even then, it's a gamble, given the weird combinations of hardware & bios, not the least of which is IDE issues, master/slave, installer switches, etc.

Only other thing I can offer is to possibly try a HDD-based install (and get the CD drive off the bus), where you put all the installation files into a mount-point, and arrange to kick off the install from that directory with some boot diskettes. There are instructions that can be searched for on the 'net, if you feel like gathering all the modern pieces, creating an install dir, and giving it a shot. This would possibly bypass much IDE (CD Drive?) grief ... certainly another data point.

If you have a real love for the old hardware, and are willing to keep trying, you'll eventually hit on a winning combination. It will take time, but it's why we explore all the old stuff in the first place ...

If you just wanted to see OS/2 running, and explore it a bit, consider virtualization. I run OS/2 in a VM (ArcaOS, 4.52, etc. all the way down to 1.xx) ... it's much easier to try out combinations, at virtual/vm speeds ... no hardware issues, no browser issues (see the virtualization subfolder on this forum).

Hope this helps ...

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