Comments on: OS/2 on a Dell Dimension 4100 rant

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:18:41 +0000

thats exactly what happens, OS/2 boots and recovers 5MB worth of junk EA’s I delete them, then restore a real OS/2 on OS/2 backup, and it works 7/8 times…

It’d be easier to boot from floppy but it’s a major pita when you can’t.

Oh that reminds me, ages ago there was also HD emulation as part of the CD-ROM boot…. I’ll have to see if that is still possible…..

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:56:24 +0000

In reply to Michal Necasek. And FYI, Drive Image usually worked pretty well for OS/2.

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:55:29 +0000

The INT13 driver is only intended for hard disks, not floppies. So that won’t do any good. The only really was one floppy hardware interface, unlike the situation with hard disks, so IBM didn’t expect they’d ever need to use the BIOS to access floppies.

MS-DOS won’t be able to restore EAs, probably doing all kinds of bad things to the desktop. But you may be able to boot OS/2 into command line and then re-restore the backup with EAs or something.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:11:08 +0000

In reply to Michal Necasek.

I had hoped the int13 driver could bypass that, but I guess its too smart for its own good….

So instead I’m resorting to using MS-DOS to restore a partial OS/2 install that used CMD.exe as a shell, dual boot into that, then restore my OS/2 install and reboot into that…

My Netware 4.11 on OS/2 thing went south real quick.. so I may just install TCP/IP and use it for quake or shove it into the closet and forget about it, I dont know yet…. A citrix multiuser version of OS/2 would be cool, but the odds of scoring that seem pretty slim, but then again that is what I thought about the October 1991 Windows NT pre-release..

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:50:48 +0000

I don’t think a bootable CD with OS/2 2.x floppy images has any chance of working. Once the kernel is initialized and a few drivers are loaded (all using the BIOS), OS/2 switches to the native floppy driver. If there’s no real floppy drive, the boot will fail. The message will be something about missing COUNTRY.SYS.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:55:56 +0000

In reply to dgunix. I used virtual pc & qemu to test what I was going to do would work in the first place... but sometimes you need real iron.. :)

By: dgunix

dgunix — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:15:37 +0000

In reply to dgunix.

And.. I’ve pasted this link, but for some reason it didn’t take:
http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=529

By: dgunix

dgunix — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:12:23 +0000

Just virtualize it all, you know you love it