OS/2 -- Keeping the Warp 4 engine in tune

By Ashton Mills - 1997-04-27

As any experienced OS/2 user knows, a fair amount of time is often spent under the hood of Warp, tweaking, fiddling and tailoring it to be the fast, powerful and efficient engine that it can be. However, while exploring the complex intricacies of this mysterious technology it is not uncommon to find the engine running drastically out of tune -- so much so that it may simply refuse to start. What do you do when the Warp engine breaks down?

Enter the maintenance partition
The theory is simple: if your primary OS/2 partition won't boot, then boot one that will. By creating a separate OS/2 partition whose sole purpose is to maintain other OS/2 partitions you will always have a safeguard to fall back on. Sound excessive? Not when you consider the alternative.

If your primary OS/2 partition is running HPFS and it dies, how will you see what's wrong and edit any files that need your attention? Boot from the OS/2 Install floppies? Sure, if you don't mind waiting 10 minutes each time you need to change one setting in your CONFIG.SYS before trying to reboot and see if all is well.

And what if you need to replace files that are locked because they belong to the OS/2 partition you booted? The 'active' drive is a problem that affects many defragmenting, disk doctoring and disk editing utilities. OS/2 is a stable and secure operating system -- it won't let you modify vital files or perform global disk operations on the partition from which you booted. In the boundaries of a multitasking operating system the contents of your disk could change at any time, causing havoc if a particular piece of software happens to be working on the assumption that data hasn't changed recently (a defragmenter is one example, CHKDSK is another).

The many uses of the maintenance partition
The first step to take when you run into problems is to try to fix them at the source. Press Alt-F1 when you boot your primary OS/2 partition and then select to drop to a command line. From here you can perform most file operations and edit your CONFIG.SYS with TEDIT if you so desire. However, because it is the boot drive, there's not a lot else you can do because it will be locked.

By booting a separate maintenance partition you will be able to do some or all of the following to any other OS/2 partitions on your system:


 * Edit the CONFIG.SYS of the target partition as well as any other configuration files relating to multimedia, networking or Win-OS/2.
 * Run CHKDSK with /F to fix errors (not just find them).
 * Defragment FAT and HPFS drives with third-party defragmenters. Because the target drive is free (not locked), the swapfile and other locked files will be defraggable as well.
 * Use back-up software to back up the drive, including files otherwise inaccessible due to a locked drive.
 * Safely undelete files on the target partition with third-party undelete programs for FAT and HPFS.
 * Modify the target partition with FDISK or, to perform partition management, with third-party programs such as Partition Magic which won't allow you to modify the partition you booted from.
 * Install FixPacks to the target partition without needing to reboot multiple times due to locked files which have to be updated using the Locked File Device Driver. No need to create multiple floppies (just install it from the hard drive using a program such as Super Virtual Disk) and no need to boot the Kicker disks.

Creating your maintenance partition
Ideally the maintenance partition should be the one partition that will always work, always be bootable and always be accessible no matter what changes are made in your machine.

For this reason, and because you don't want to create a fully operational duplicate OS/2 partition, you want to make the maintenance partition as small as possible using as many of the default, hardware-unspecific drivers as possible. Start by creating a new partition on one of your drives using, preferably, something like Partition Magic. If you use FDISK you'll lose data on other partitions of the same drive. You'll need around 100M. The final installation takes up about 80M but you want to leave some space for any utilities you install (such as third-party defragmenters, disk doctors and so on) as well as a bit of space for an 8M or 16M swapfile. If you can afford the space, create the partition with a size somewhere between 100M and 150M.

Next, start installing OS/2 as you normally would, using FDISK (once the floppies have booted) to set your new partition as 'Installable'. Note that if you don't currently run Boot Manager or a third-party partition boot manager such as System Commander you're going to have to install Boot Manager so you'll have the option of booting your normal OS/2 partition or your OS/2 maintenance partition. You'll need to create a 2M partition at the start or end of your drive and use FDISK to install Boot Manager there.

Once that's done, choose an Advanced installation and format the partition as FAT or HPFS. It shouldn't matter which you choose and all depends on your preference (which may be determined by your hardware -- if you're short on RAM, choose a FAT partition). OS/2 will start installing its core files and you won't be prompted until the machine has rebooted once and presents you with the Selective Install screen.

From here we make a couple of changes from the standard OS/2 installation:
 * Set your country as usual and make sure the detected settings for your SCSI devices and so on are correct.
 * Set your Primary Display to VGA. Look for and select the VGA driver (not SVGA or VGA IBM 256c). This isn't meant to be a fancy boot, just a maintenance partition. By keeping VGA you'll also be able to boot this partition if you happen to change your video card (something your primary OS/2 partition would fail at if you didn't remember to change to VGA before installing the new card).
 * Remove any soundcard drivers. You won't be needing these.

On the following screen:
 * Remove all support for APM (Advanced Power Management), external floppy support, infra-red support, and so on.
 * Unless you think you'll be printing out any files during your maintenance sessions, do not install any printer drivers.

On the System Components screen:
 * Leave the Assistance Center selected (an excellent resource). Click on 'More' and remove the WarpGuide. You will find the files contained in the Assistance Center to be vital if you come across a problem you can't solve. Just do a search and you'll be sure to find your answer.
 * Leave Fonts selected.
 * Leave Optional System Utilities selected. In here are some of the default file and disk operations you may need to use. Click on 'More' and remove the Picture Viewer, PMREXX and the Utility Disks.
 * Deselect Optional System Components. You shouldn't be needing OpenDoc or VoiceType.
 * Deselect the BonusPak. AskPSP, a very handy question/answer expert system, could also help solve any problems you have, but at 4M only install it if you have the space.
 * Deselect Java Development.
 * Leave Tools and Games selected. Click 'More' and remove all the games. The tools we want to keep here are the Enhanced Editor and Search utility. Very handy when it comes to finding and editing files.
 * Leave OS/2 DOS Support selected. If you don't already have a collection of quality DOS system utilities you should probably get some.
 * Deselect Win-OS/2 support. What do you need Windows for?
 * Deselect Multimedia Software Support.

When you're prompted to install Networking support don't select any options (unless you desire a networked maintenance partition). You will be told that you have to install at least the Protocol Support Services, to which you can click 'OK' and then just select 'No Adapter'.

Once the machine has finished rebooting you can optimise the CONFIG.SYS and set appropriate cache settings like you would with any other OS/2 partition. Be sure to set a minimum swapfile size of 8M.

Other options
The maintenance partition described above is a fast-booting, driver-basic, fully operational OS/2 system to cater for any need that arises when it comes to maintaining your primary OS/2 partition. Apart from needing to install third-party disk and file utilities you should find that you lack nothing. All tools will be at your disposal if you should ever require the maintenance partition to make slight or major changes to any other OS/2 partition.

However, there are also third-party utilities freely available on the Web that will create bootable floppies on one or two disks (rather than Warp 4's three disks) which can quickly be used to boot to a command line. But even this is much slower than a dedicated partition (it does, however, have the advantage of not using hard drive space).

One such program, BOOTOS2, has been included on this month's apcmag.cd. BOOTOS2 creates bootable floppies or hard drive partitions from a current Warp install. Be sure to read the documents carefully before using it.

If you're looking for OS/2-based system utilities to use with your OS/2 maintenance partition, check out Australia's own Graham Utilities (designed as an OS/2 equivalent of the old DOS-based Norton Utilities) at http://www.warpspeed.com.au, or the GammaTech utilities at http://www.softouch.com.

Other handy shareware utilities (some of which have featured previously in these columns) are Super Virtual Disk, PMVideo, ZTreeBold (also Australian) and HPFS Access, all freely available on the Web.

Tip of the month
Frustrated that Netscape for OS/2 is only at Version 2.02 while its Windows counterparts are up to Version 3.0? Be frustrated no longer.

Netscape/2 2.02 is, in fact, a Netscape 3.0 back end with a 2.02 front end. When Netscape/2 was in development, Version 3.0 wasn't in a stable form and, as is the IBM motto, stability always comes first. Thus with Netscape/2, while incorporating many of the features of Version 3.0 as well as many extra features found only in Netscape/2, Netscape eventually decided to keep with the tried and true 2.02 front end.

Normally when a Web page queries your browser it will return a version level of 2.02. Internal developers at Netscape, however, also installed a switch to allow Netscape/2 to report its true version level -- a switch they have been using internally since its release. Simply append the switch '-3' when you run Netscape and it will, when asked, report its version as Netscape 3.0. For more Netscape/2 information check out the unofficial home page at http://home.netscape.com/people/mcw. If you think Netscape/2 plug-in support is insufficient, the following pages on this site will change your mind:

http://home.netscape.com/people/mcw/navos23rd.html has a list of third-party applications for Netscape/2, while http://home.netscape.com/people/mcw/navos2app.html contains a list of OS/2 native plug-ins. And don't forget, Netscape/2 can use any 16-bit Windows plug-in, which constitutes a very large portion of plug-ins currently available.