stuck "loading system files" while installing OS/2

[hush]

hey all! i have a first gen pentium PS/2 that i am currently having trouble getting OS/2 installed on, i am completely stuck at the moment and would appreciate any guidance

i have tried both original warp 3 install media and newly written warp 4 media but the issue is the same for both: i am able to progress through fdisk and partition my disks, and even reboot to select my newly created C: partition, but when the installation gets to "loading system files" it invariably gets stuck. i have removed everything but the bare necessities (SCSI, VGA, CPU, RAM) from the machine, but it still does not work. pressing alt-F2 does not show it getting stuck loading any drivers at that stage, it seems that everything necessary is already loaded and working by that point. there is no activity on any of the drives during this time as far as i can tell, and even given 10-15 minutes or so the installation never progressed beyond that screen.

i do not suspect hardware as the machine has a working OS/2 installation, but it is quite old and messy so i am trying to start fresh after backing up all the important bits. i am unable to run arcaOS as the machine has 32MB of RAM at present and i do not think it can even support the minimum 512MB that arcaOS wants. none of the cards are particularly exotic, the SCSI adapters are IBM fast/wide SCSI-2 cards and the VGA is just a standard IBM XGA-2.

thank you in advance!

 

[Caluser2000]

What version of OS/2 Warp is on the system?

What specific driver is it hanging up on? You can comment it out of the config.sys file with an ; if I remember correctly.

 

[hush]

What version of OS/2 Warp is on the system?

warp 3 previously

 

[hush]

on a whim i decided to try recreating the RAID that the C: partition originally resided on, and now during boot i am getting "fdisk unsuccessful". according to the ATOC documentation here:

             OS/2 requires that the partition you are installing must
             be less than 2 GB for HPFS partition and less than 1 GB
             for FAT.  The FDISK program will not show the size of
             the drive properly if they are greater than 2GB unless
             the device driver IBMRAID.ADD is loaded.  To load the
             drive during installation copy the driver from OS2
             subdirectory of the option diskette to copy of the OS/2
             Diskette 1 and add

                   BASEDEV=IBMRAID.ADD

             to CONFIG.SYS in OS/2 DIskette 1.  If diskette 1 does
             not have enough diskette space to copy the driver,
             delete device drivers from diskette 1 that are not being
             used to make space for IBMRAID.ADD (make sure that you
             make a copy of diskette 1 before deleting any files).
             To make space in Diskette 1 delete following file from
             the copy of OS/2 Diskette 1:  AHA152X.ADD, AHA154X.ADD.
             You also need to remove corresponding basedev statements
             from the CONFIG.SYS file.  (Refer to Control Program
             GG24-3730-00 page 59 - 60 for detail explanation of the
             basedev statements in the CONFIG.SYS ).

my virtual disk is over 8GB, so i imaged disk 1 from my copy of the warp 3 distribution and deleted the PRINT0* files to free up enough space for the IBMRAID.ADD file and added it to CONFIG.SYS as instructed. this does not seem to work, though, rebooting with my updated copy of disk 1 results in the same "fdisk unsuccessful" error. any thoughts?

 

[hush]

i resolved this- eventually gave up on warp 3 after a friend suggested i do so, warp 4 installs on this machine without issue.