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OS/2 Warp Installation Issues

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VirusVox

Member
Joined
May 5, 2020
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45
Location
New Brunswick, Canada
Hello everyone!

Recently I've acquired a beautiful big box copy of OS/2 Warp on 3.5" disks and I'm attempting to test out the disks by installing the Operating System with them.

My test system is a Dell OptiPlex XL 575 with a Pentium 75 inside. I usually insert physical hard drives into all of my systems as a personal preference, but in this case the system is very slim and I have no room to mount one. Therefore I tried to utilize my XT-IDE Rev2 CF adapter in its place, as I've heard they're really handy and I've yet to use it in a build.

I plopped it into the system and got things up and running and installed MS-DOS 6.22 onto a 1GB SanDisk Ultra CF card and then moved to install OS/2 Warp. The initial disk worked fine and asked me to insert disk one. After inserting disk one and receiving the splash screen it halted the system, posting a "OS/2 cannot operate your hard disk or diskette drive." error.

I then moved to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which installed just fine onto the CF card, and then I went to try again out of curiosity. Again I'm met with the same error trying to install OS/2.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I might try, or on why this doesn't happen to work?

Install disk one appears perfectly readable and my diskette drive is acting normal so I'm disinclined to believe there's anything physically wrong here.
 
OS/2 has driver issues with some chipsets. It will start the install process either from the floppy or even form the CD and at one point it will initialize and can't see the IDE anymore.
 
That I immediately off hand know, no. The last time I ran into it was about 10 years ago and of all places it was a Warp 3 and a 365XD thinkpad.
 
I just picked up two of these, they seem really handy! I was wondering in the back of my mind if the custom XTIDE BIOS and whatnot might interfere with the OS/2 install.

I'll report back when they arrive!
 
Warp, after it does initial loading, switches to its own protected-mode drivers and has no further use for the BIOS. If nobody's bothered to write an XTIDE driver for Warp, you're out of luck. Win 3.1 still uses BIOS. You'll find the same issue if you load up NT 4. or later--or Linux.
 
VirusVox said:
I just picked up two of these, they seem really handy! I was wondering in the back of my mind if the custom XTIDE BIOS and whatnot might interfere with the OS/2 install.

I'll report back when they arrive!
Click to expand...

As Chuck says OS/2 never used the BIOS it expects to use its own drivers, You might get the INT13 driver to work which does use the BIOS but its slow....

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/IBMINT13.I13
 
Replace the IBMS506.ADD with DANIS506.ADD. That one has much higher compatibility with modern controllers, and can handle higher capacity disks (bigger than 504 MB, LBA etc.). Also, if you install from CD, you need to replace on the destination disk (the installer copies from the installation disk, not the one you booted from - unless you set COPYFROMFLOPPY=1 in CONFIG.SYS).

The Warp installation is a bit messy.
 
Where can I acquire a copy of DANIS506.ADD? I downloaded OS/2 Warp Fix Pak 43 from an ancient IBM FTP after being recommended to install it too after I finish the initial Warp installation.
 
What's the newest CPU that OS/2 will support? I ran it years and years ago. I did like it and had hoped it would do better than it did against Winders.
 
VirusVox said:
Where can I acquire a copy of DANIS506.ADD? I downloaded OS/2 Warp Fix Pak 43 from an ancient IBM FTP after being recommended to install it too after I finish the initial Warp installation.
Click to expand...

Hi. You could tell us where that is please or pm me the link. Have 486dx2/66 with 32megs of ran running OS/2 v3.

Cheers.
 
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