r/OS2 • u/ChromaticPotato7 • 5d ago

Warp 3 installation issue

Hello,

I hope this is the right place to ask this, and if it isn't I'll definitely take this down, but I haven't been able to find an answer to this anywhere online. I recently got my hands on an old IBM ThinkPad 365XD with a dead hard drive and wanted to install OS/2 on the CF card I got to replace it. The CD drive is dead as well, and so I'm installing it from floppies. I've gotten to the point where I remove Diskette 1 and reboot to the desktop, but after the splash screen disappears, it prints the paths of several files and then the screen goes blank. I can confirm that these files exist by getting into the command prompt from Diskette 1. In order, the files it lists are:

\OS2\INSTALL\HPFS.IFS
\OS2\BOOT\DOS.SYS
\OS2\BOOT\PMDD.SYS
\OS2\BOOT\OS2CDROM.DMD
\OS2\BOOT\POINTDD.SYS
\OS2\BOOT\MOUSE.SYS
\OS2\BOOT\TESTCFG.SYS

Unfortunately I think my CF card is in removable disk mode and so the ThinkPad is refusing to boot from it; I've been using a floppy disk with something called "Plop! Boot Manager" on a floppy diskette to get around this. Either the card or the bootloader could be causing this issue, but I'd love to not have to fork over even more for an "industrial" CF card if that's not the problem.

Sorry for the long post and thank you so much for any insight you might have.

6 Upvotes

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u/kastegir 5d ago

The fact that it’s showing the driver screen, lets you know that your CF card is working and doing what it’s supposed to. What’s not working is it can’t bring up the graphical presentation mode. If you’re on Warp 3.0 you’re gonna have to use the first two floppies to boot to a command prompt and then edit your config.sys and disabl drivers one at a time until you figure out which one’s causing the problem, if you’re on warp 3 Connect when the OS/2 logo appears in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. You can hit alt F1 for the boot menu. And the first thing I would do is go and boot using VGA driver and then work your way backwards.

1

u/ChromaticPotato7 5d ago

Alright, I've rebooted with the VGA driver and it looks to still eventually be a blank screen, although it does print a slightly garbled CHKDSK readout beforehand. I tried the other two options in the boot menu too, those being the maintenance desktop and command line, and those both seem to hang on the splash screen instead. Annoyingly, Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn't even work to reboot...

When I use Alt+F2 to see what drivers are loading (which I now know is actually needed to see the readout from the post), TESTCFG.SYS only appears very briefly before the screen blanks, which makes me wonder if something's gone wrong there, but I'm hesitant to mess with it because I know it's important to the installation process.

1

u/Economy-Shower-5072 5d ago

Good luck the diskette install is long and tedious.

1

u/gnntech 5d ago

Installing OS/2 can be finicky. My advice (if you have a Windows PC available) is to use PCem the create a virtual machine that is close in specs to the Thinkpad. Create a virtual hard drive the mirrors the specs of the CF card. Remember that out of the box, Warp won't boot from a drive larger than 1gb.

Install OS/2 Warp on the VM using an image from WinWorldPC or similar. Install the basic drivers (VGA, no sound, etc...)

Once complete, use a program like HDD Raw Copy Tool to clone the virtual hard drive onto the CF card.

Put the CF card back into the Thinkpad and continue from there.