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World of trouble installing OS/2 WARP 4

Started by tgp1994, 2012.05.28, 19:48:06

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tgp1994

Hi everyone,

For a little background, I seem to have missed a golden age of computing. I would like to at least experience the operating system side of that golden age by trying out OS/2. Boy, am I getting the full tour! :P

I'll start off by saying that I'm trying to install Warp 4 into a virtualbox machine. I've tried posting in their forums, although I'm told that there aren't enough OS/2 pros there to help with the issue(s), so I'm hoping that my issues are generic enough that they don't just apply to virtualbox.

I am able to boot all the way up the second (third?) installation diskette. After pressing enter to continue past the copyright/operating system information, I'm presented with an error looking like this:

OS/2 Warp 4 System Installatio

SYS0318: Message file OSO001.MSG cannot be found for message    3175.


After pressing enter to end this program, my screen turns red, with the following error message:

ERROR: SYSINST2.EXE failed to return the target drive.

F3=Command Prompt


I'm not exactly sure *what* the target drive is here. All I know is that I was able to format my C: drive from the installation environment, and I'm able to copy files to it manually, so it seems like the drive is responding normally.

In case it was a driver issue, I installed Steven's danis506r187 drivers, along with his ATAPI v. 0.4.0 filter driver, which doesn't seem to fix my issue.

I have 64MB of ram allocated to this machine, and the IDE controller is emulated as PIIX3.

If anyone could help, that would be great.

Radek

One of the problems might be the v. 187 "dani" driver. Versions 185 and 187 are intended for eCS, Warp is too old for them. Try v. 170 with v. 038 ATAPI driver. They should work with OS/2 W4. Also, make sure that the CONFIG.SYS on your diskette contains SET COPYFROMFLOPPY = 1.

RobertM

What version of Virtualbox, what host OS, what other config or virtual BIOS settings (ie: DON'T choose "OS/2" for any memory settings) and so on might also be helpful so we can help you.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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tgp1994

Quote from: Radek on 2012.05.29, 07:24:17
One of the problems might be the v. 187 "dani" driver. Versions 185 and 187 are intended for eCS, Warp is too old for them. Try v. 170 with v. 038 ATAPI driver. They should work with OS/2 W4. Also, make sure that the CONFIG.SYS on your diskette contains SET COPYFROMFLOPPY = 1.

Oh, figures.

I was able to find and patch in the S560 driver ok, but I found it impossible to find the 038 version of the atapi driver. I downloaded v.039 instead, hopefully that won't be much different. I'll have my current CONFIG.SYS file attached, if that helps. copyfromfloppy should be set.

Booting up with the new set of drivers still results in the same error for me.

Quote from: RobertM on 2012.05.29, 17:36:21
What version of Virtualbox, what host OS, what other config or virtual BIOS settings (ie: DON'T choose "OS/2" for any memory settings) and so on might also be helpful so we can help you.

Sorry about that, here's some more information. I'm running Virtualbox version 4.1.16 on Windows Vista Ultimate SP2, 64 bit. No special features are set in the system config, except for VT-x/AMD-V and Nested Paging being enabled. Virtualbox doesn't seem to have a virtual bios (that we can configure at least). I hope that helps you help me :)

RobertM

Four things:
(1) the vHDD should not be greater than 500GB
(2) the boot partition cannot be greater than 64GB
(3) regardless of the 64GB limit, an HPFS partition shouldnt exceed 50ish GB
(4) if installing to FAT (please dont), the partitio :Dn must be 2GB or less and reside at the beginning of the vHDD's free space.

R


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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tgp1994

Quote from: RobertM on 2012.05.30, 00:25:59
Four things:
(1) the vHDD should not be greater than 500GB
(2) the boot partition cannot be greater than 64GB
(3) regardless of the 64GB limit, an HPFS partition shouldnt exceed 50ish GB
(4) if installing to FAT (please dont), the partitio :Dn must be 2GB or less and reside at the beginning of the vHDD's free space.

R


Ah, another thing I forgot to mention, sorry! The hard drive its self is no larger than 512MB, so I should be falling under those requirements. I'm not sure how to specify a partition type when using FDISK, it only seems to let me do FAT.

ivan

A couple of things.

First DON'T use easy install, you don't get any options.  You should use advanced install then fdisk will give you the necessary options.

Second, give yourself a second disk of a couple of GB to put programs on otherwise you will run out of space on the boot partition.

Just in case the above does not get you going I will use a clients windows computer we have in for upgrading to set up a VM and install Warp 4 on it just to see what other pitfalls you might encounter.  It is so long since I installed OS/2 using floppies I'll have to relearn what to do - we use a bootable CD updated to the latest fixpacks for reinstalls now.

tgp1994

#7
Thanks Ivan,

Quote from: ivan on 2012.05.30, 00:52:02
First DON'T use easy install, you don't get any options.  You should use advanced install then fdisk will give you the necessary options.

I've been hearing a lot about this easy / advanced install, but sadly, I have yet to see this screen. I used fdisk by finding it in the CDROM (I think) after I was dropped to the prompt.

Quote from: ivan on 2012.05.30, 00:52:02
Second, give yourself a second disk of a couple of GB to put programs on otherwise you will run out of space on the boot partition.

If I can even get the installer to put data on there :P

Quote from: ivan on 2012.05.30, 00:52:02
Just in case the above does not get you going I will use a clients windows computer we have in for upgrading to set up a VM and install Warp 4 on it just to see what other pitfalls you might encounter.  It is so long since I installed OS/2 using floppies I'll have to relearn what to do - we use a bootable CD updated to the latest fixpacks for reinstalls now.

Thank you, I would really appreciate that. You didn't happen to use UpdCD, did you? I was going to try and update my installation cd in an attempt to see if that would fix any of my issues, although I don't really see how one can get the updcd environment onto a hard disk when all you have to boot from is floppies. I mean, the updcd folder is larger than a floppy, so how are you expected to make it available to the maintenance disks that it makes?

Radek

(1) The new dani drivers intended for eCS are v. 185 and above plus v. 040 and above for ATAPI drives. All lower versions sould be okay for W4.
(2) "FDISK only seems to allow me FAT". FDISK only creates a partition, it does not format it. The partition needs to be formatted after FDISK but before installing the operating system. IIRC, after FDISK, you should be prompted for reboot and and after reboot, you should format. Here you can select whether you want FAT or HPFS. Select HPFS.

Have you seen a message "the system will be rebooted in xxx seconds" or so after leaving FDISK?
Have you saved the created partitions (F3) after FDISKing?
Have you made your new partition for W4 bootable and startable?

tgp1994

That's odd, because I recall being able to write directories and folders to it. Is it the possible that the installer at some point sees this unformatted space, formats it, then writes its temporary files to this new space?

I haven't seen the message "the system will be rebooted in xxx seconds", FDISK only prompts me to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete after it says that the drive letters have changed. Yup, I press F3 to save and exit fdisk. And yes. At least, I've created the boot manager partition, set it to startable, then I made an unformatted partition, and it is bootable.

FYI this is what I've done by manually starting fdisk.com from the second installation floppy.

ivan

OK, this is not easy.  I have only spent about a half hour on it so far using the latest vbox-4.1.16-78094 on win xp.

Setup: base memory 512MB, chipset PIIX3, enable PAE/NX, enable VT-x/AMD-V, virtual disk 10.4GB on IDE1 and CD on IDE2, floppy controller set up for disk images.

First up,  standard warp4 floppies do not work - they need to be updated with a newer kernel and ide and cd drivers.  I now have a set of disk images that boot through to the format screen but clag out on format (fdisk set up a 1GB primary partition and the remainder as an extended drive).

Because I have a forth floppy image with utilities on it, I formatted drive C as HPFS then ran CDINST from disk2.  This installed the directory structure and files onto C but not the updated drivers.

Tomorrow I will try and see why there is the problem with formatting from the install procedure and hopefully come up with a set of disk images that will lead to a full install.

Note, it is possible because I have installed, admittedly fully updated, Warp4 on the above setup using our bootable CD.  In fact that is where I got the disk images.

ivan

tgp1994

Thanks for the update, ivan.

I was just getting UpdCD a try, I haven't gotten very far into the process though.

Were these disk images also updated by UpdCD?

dryeo

There are updated install disks (meant for Thinkpads but work fine on most systems) here, http://www.os2site.com/sw/upgrades/boot/index.html
More info for bringing Warp v4 up to date here, http://www.os2site.com/sw/upgrades/upgrades.html

Radek

Do not install boot manager in a virtual machine. Do not make more than one partition on a virtual disk. The boot manager is useless (you can have more VHDs and boot which one you want), moreover, OS/2 boot manager partition is 0x0A - neither FAT nor HPFS nor something otherwise common. I do not have VirtualBox (my archaic comp does not have VT-X) but the type 0x0A partition can be also a part of your problems.

Try only one partition on a VHD. Create a 1 GB VHD. For W4, this should be more than enough. If you succeed with this VHD, create another VHD for your data and apps and add it to your virtual machine.

RobertM

Though I have never done a setup with this version of Virtualbox, Bootmanager is a necessary requirement for some Warp 4 setups. Not for the operating system itself, but for functionality required by the "real machine" setup trying to be replicated, even with only one boot partition. It is IBM's (ancient yet) recommended method of easy reboot control, via the "setboot" tool that gets installed with it, which allows any app or script to call a reboot without the coder needing to know anything about how to tell OS/2 to reboot.

I've seen various industrial setups that rely on it -compatibility for testing in a virtual environment would thus require such as well... and quite a few "hobbyist types" who come here are actually support people with little to no OS/2 background who are charged with supporting or virtualizing their existing OS/2 setups...

So, re: bootmanager and such (in a virtualized endvironment), the true question is whether it is possible - not whether it is a good or bad idea.


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