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OS2 warp 4 hard drive size problems

Started by millese, 2008.10.21, 22:25:53

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millese

1st off I want to thank you for your time. I am new to your forum and probably like many others, I am here because I am having an issue with my os2 computer(s). I work in the semi conductor industry and we have a fleet of tools running os2 computers to run the machinery. The tools are running various versions IBM 7587 industrial computers running OS2 warp NDIS 2.0.1 and driver 1.06 and they have hard drive ranging in size for 4 to 6.4 Gig's. As these computers get older the HD's are beginning to fail, and finding drives this small is becoming very hard. Yesterday, I had a HD fail and was able to get another HD of the same size off of a working computer and had a local company do a sector for sector copy from the 6.4 Gig drive to a 40 Gig drive. When I installed the 40 gig into the computer it booted to the boot manager auto selected the os2 partition as it usually does then just froze with os2 logo screen up. I went into the bios and it recoginizes the HD as a 40 Gig, but the guy who did the copy said that he has never had an issue going from a smaller drive to a larger one, but again he is not usually copying os2 drives. Is this a OS2 limitation or a bios limitation or both? I have been reading through this forum a bit and have seen some posts relative to the IDE driver and its ability to see the entire drive when using large HD's is it possible all I need is an upgraded IDE driver?

Fahrvenugen

Hi,

A few additional things.

First, as noted in the previous reply, the problem is likely that you have an old IBM1S506.add driver, the older vsrsions of this driver do not recognize large hard disks (by large, anything above about 6 Gigs).  The best is to download the Danis506 driver as above.

Second, you don't mention which version of OS/2 you're working with, but if you're working with either Version 3 or 4 (pre-LVM), then you're going to need to make sure that OS/2 is installed on a partition which is entirely located within the first 1024 cylinders of the hard disk.  In your case, if that initial partition is within the first 6.4 Gigs (as you mentioned you were going from a 6.4 Gig HD) then you'll be fine.


The third thing, if you're trying to get the install that you have on that 40 Gig HDD up and running, you'll need a set of boot disks (or a custom made boot CD).  Boot to a command prompt and copy the danis506.add file into c:\os2\boot and (or whatever drive holds your OS/2 stuff, usually C but it is possible for it to be different) then modify the config.sys in your root directory  (for this you can use the tedit.exe application that usually resides on either the boot disks or c:\os2) to REM out the ibm1s506.add and add in the basedev line for DANIS506

Hope this helps.

millese

Thank you both for you input. I'm going to sound even more idiotic than I already appear with my next question. I am not sure which version of OS2 I am dealing with. When I turn on the computer is goes to a boot manager with a small 6.0 dos partition on C: and what is listed as WARP 4 on the D: partition. When I get to the desk top I go under system properties like I do on any other o.s I have used, but it does not say what version I am on. Can you help me with where to find this info on the computer? Another question I have is with the age of the computers I am working with will the BIOS be an issue with disk size as well? I have read a bit on here that seems to indicate that OS2 deals with drive's and overrides the bios is this correct? And one more question, can I mount my 40gig as a slave on an os2 computer that has the dani upgrade and just move the files without the boot disks? Can the driver just be copied into the proper directories, or does it need to be "installed"?  I am up to speed with how to modify the config.sys, I just want to make sure I put the danis506.add file in all the correct directories. Again, please forgive me for my lack of knowledge here and I very much appreciate your time.

millese

That was great info, I'll try in now and let you know how it goes!

millese

It worked!!!! I was able to install the Dani driver on a working machine and mount the 40 gig drive and install the driver now it's booting just fine. ;D ;D I feel very lucky that there are people out there this generous with their time and knowledge. Thanks ddan and Fahrvenugen. Is there and add I can click on somewhere for you guys? LOL  :D

Saijin_Naib

Be aware that the current and previous generation of CF and CFII type drives have no wear-leveling mechanisms built in and will quickly meet/exceed their 10,000-100,000 writes per cell limit imposed by the current generation of flash memory.

If you intend to use flash memory in a Operating System capacity you should really look into a proper SSD with SLC (Single Level Cells) and Wear Leveling or find a very new CF card that has 100,000+ writes per cell.

Also, as an addendum to the above you should strongly consider disabling any swap path on the CF card but instead use a RAM-DRIVE (IFS-Installable File System driver) to make a virtual swap that is held in memory to cut down on excess read/write operations to the flash media. On top of that, you should choose wisely the filesystem you use on the CF card. For eCS we are very limited to HPFS and JFS, both which have their positives and negatives. JFS will fragment but does not require pre-boot consistency checks of the entire volume (but rather just the journal) and may save you a few write cycles that way.

I'd ask another with more in-depth knowledge of the write habits of HPFS/HPFS386/JFS to step in and elaborate further on this matter so that we all may benefit and learn which IFS to be used on our currently limited flash media.

Saijin_Naib

No, I am not. As far as I have found, the wear leveling employed in consumer grade CF cards is barely passable as wear leveling and may only rate wear statistics on block 0 of the storage media or rely on filesystem driver assistance to complete it's task. I know that industrial grade CF devices have much more advanced wear leveling and will withstand being used in Operating System capacity much better. Also, SSDs (being designed purposefully for this task) employ better wear leveling methods and are (if you get SLC) physically more robust to write-cycle issues. I am only trying to offer what info I can to possibly prevent a failure down the road due to improper application of a CF card. Also, SSDs are not very large at all. You can get 4 and 8gb ones fairly easily and for about the same price of CF cards at times.

Saijin_Naib

Not reckless, just shrewd.
"SanDisk does not warrant, and shall not be responsible for, any lost data or images contained in any product (including in any returned product), regardless of the cause of the loss. SanDisk's products are not warranted to operate without failure. SanDisk products must not be used in life support systems or other applications where failure could threaten injury or life."

Now, in the USA, it's warrantied so long as the original purchaser holds it (10 years from DOP elsewhere). The warranty covers the product being free from material defects, but the write cycle limitations of flash are NOT material defects, they are an inherent limitation of the medium and as cited above, are NOT covered under warranty.

Saijin_Naib

1)I believe it does
2)So you get another CF card which will fail the same way? Excellent.
3)Point to you.

Edit: hiatus for now, I've much work to do.

Fahrvenugen

#9
Quote from: millese on 2008.10.23, 09:26:42
It worked!!!! I was able to install the Dani driver on a working machine and mount the 40 gig drive and install the driver now it's booting just fine. ;D ;D I feel very lucky that there are people out there this generous with their time and knowledge. Thanks ddan and Fahrvenugen. Is there and add I can click on somewhere for you guys? LOL  :D

Hi Millese,

First, don't feel "idiotic" or anything like that.  OS/2 can be a bit of a challenge to understand, especially at first.  But rest assured you've found one of the best places for help.  :)

Glad to hear it worked, and glad to help!  I know I've benefited from the knowledge of others over the years, and am happy to help when I can.

As far as the other questions about how to create another boot drive, once you get a booting system (which is probably a good idea, create a "spare" bootable drive and leave it on a shelf somewhere if you have a drive failure in the future)...  here's my suggestions.

As mentioned, DANIS506.ADD (and IBM1S605.ADD does this too, but not as well as the DANIS driver) over rides the BIOS settings on a hard disk.  So if you can get a computer to recognize a hard disk enough to boot, once DANIS506 kicks in, it does the work.  But on older computers, it can sometimes be difficult to get the computer to even just recognize the hard disk.  So here's what I'v found...

Newer systems generally don't have a problem, but older systems with LBA turned on in the BIOS still sometimes have issues with the BIOS recognizing anything above 137 Gigs (I have an old P3 that has this exact problem). Unless you know your system will recognize it, get a spare drive that is less then this (I recommend either a 40 or 80 Gig to be safe....  and I know 80 Gig drives can still be found new...  but you *will* need to have LBA turned on in the BIOS).

For partitioning the drive, OS/2 version 4.52 (or eCS) is not limited by where the boot partition is on the drive, but older versions of OS/2 (version 4.5, Version 4, and Version 3) the boot partition needs to be within the first 1024 cylinders of the drive.

So given that it looks like you have Version 4, I'm going to play it safe, and guess that you might have the older version of V4 instead of one with LVM.  Having said that, here's what I would do:

1.  Get a 40 (or 80) Gig HDD
2.  Set that drive to be a "Slave", install it in a computer that currently boots to OS/2, make sure the drive is showing up in BIOS, and boot up OS/2
3.  When in OS/2, fire up fdiskpm.exe - open up an OS/2  command prompt and type fdiskpm.exe
4.  In the FDISK window, make sure you select the "new" drive (it'll probably show up as drive 2 or 3  or something like that, in the top part of the GUI, when you select it the drive will probably show up as "unpartitioned" too)
5.  Use the menu options to install boot manager on to that drive
6.  Create a primary partition on that drive, something relatively small to make sure it'll be within the first 1024 cylinders (4 to 6 gigs should work)
7.  Once you've created the partition you may have to reboot to get it to assign a drive letter.  Sometimes it will assign a drive letter, sometimes a reboot is required.
8.  Once rebooted, you'll need to format the drive, format with HPFS (start an OS/2 command prompt and type:

format x: /fs:hpfs

where X is the new drive letter

9.  Once formatted, use the command:

xcopy d:\*.* x: /H /O /T /S /E /R /V

where D is your boot drive, X is your newly formatted drive

10.  Once everything has copied over, use the command:

sysinstx x:

This is like the old DOS bases SYS command - it copies over a few boot files

11.  Start up fdiskpm again, make sure your partition on that new drive is set to bootable (or startable)

12.  Once done, put the hard disk into a machine as the primary master drive and test it.  It should boot up.  Once it boots up, you may have to start up fdiskpm again and set the Boot Manager partition as "startable" and add the new "boot" partition to the boot manager menu.

13.  Once you have a booting system, you can also partition the rest of the space on that hard disk for data if you like.  Just use fdiskpm for that.

Just a side note... use caution when using fdiskpm.  If you have the wrong disk selected (for example, if you have your primary boot drive selected instead of the "new" drive you're trying to partition) you can run into a situation where you mess up your boot drive!  Check and double check to make sure you're working with the correct drive before saving any changes!

Hope this helps!



millese

That is great information. For the machines I am running they are set up as follows
                            startable          primary           boot manager         7meg
pc dos 7                bootable       C: primary          Fat                    102meg
OS2 WARP 4           bootable       D: Logical           Fat                    502meg
                                               E: Logical          HPFS                2000meg
                                              :Pri/Log              Freespace          3537meg
As I stated in original post I work in semiconductor and have over 50 of these in slightly different configurations. One thing they all have in common is the dos partition preceding the os2 partition. Can you think of any reason for this? The one thing I have noticed along this path of file and driver upgrading was than even with the larger drive size (40gig) after I did the sector for sector copy the dos partition continued to operate and I was able to add the dani driver to the os2 partition and modify the config.sys from the DOS prompt and this made it so I did not have to boot the drive as a slave. Do you think they do this purpose so if screw something up in the config.sys while loading specific components (I.E. ELO drivers) and are unable to boot to os2 they still would have a path in? Or, in that case would they just Alt-F1 and reload the default config.sys. I'm just curious... for the sake of standardization for people that may follow long after I have gone, I would like to maintain this partition format. In that case I would need to copy the DOS 7 files over to the dos partition I would have to create. Is this possilble? Sorry in advance for my grammer. :)

RobertM

The DOS partition precedes the OS/2 partition because DOS prefers booting from the first primary partition on the first hard drive, and residing in the first 1024 cylinders (0-1023) meaning up to 8GB - and the FAT16 file system for OS/2 does not support more than 2GB. Thus, the first partition should be the DOS boot partition (or boot manager followed immediately by it), and under 2GB (including bootmanager if installed).

IIRC, it's simply a limitation of the FAT16 file system.

Robert
(corrections and/or better explanations welcome)


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RobertM

#12
Hey ddan,

Thanks... yes I did. millese, skip my answer for all but the technical (HDD/filesystem related) reasons for the partition layout - and see ddan's answer for the maintenance and logistic reasons.

Rob


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millese

Cool thank you both. Is a fat partition a fat partition whether it's created with DOS using Fdisk or using os2 fdiskpm? I'm just wondering if there is an advantage to one over the other seeing as how I can boot to either dos or os2. Thanks

RobertM

Quote from: millese on 2008.10.24, 22:30:05
Cool thank you both. Is a fat partition a fat partition whether it's created with DOS using Fdisk or using os2 fdiskpm? I'm just wondering if there is an advantage to one over the other seeing as how I can boot to either dos or os2. Thanks

Probably the best way (especially since you seem to need to install Boot Manager) is to simply do it via OS/2's fdisk or fdiskpm. If you use the DOS fdisk, ensure it's FAT16 partitions you create, and that you have already created your BootManager using OS/2's fdisk first.

Rob


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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