🚀 go-pugleaf

After many abortive attempts to install the 2.1 Beta directly from the
DAP CD, as well as from diskettes made from it, the problem turned out
to be a BAD CD.

The install failures ran the gamut from trap 000d and trap 000e to
missing CLOCK01.SYS, KBD01.SYS, and PMWP.DLLs among others.  Sometimes
the crash was even before the FDISK screen came up.  Also, there were a
few random hangs at various disks or files once I got past FDISK.

The ONLY VISIBLE CLUES were a rythmic blinking (around 3 Hz) of the
access light on the CD-ROM drive (while it kept trying re-reads) and
differing amounts of time for each rebuild of the installation
diskettes.  Rather than the diskette access light being on continuously
with only occasional CD reads, most of the time was spent on CD reads
with only occasional diskette writes.  Once, diskette 1 took over 45
minutes to create.

Each time I generated a new set of installation diskettes, the errors
were new.  With each set of installation diskettes, however, the errors
were repeatable.

The problem seems to be that the install program doesn't time out when
it encounters a bad track on the CD, but keeps trying to read.  My
guess is that eventually it gets either a good read or one with so many
errors that it can't detect them.  The result is that files are
randomly corrupted when copied off the CD.

Once I finally managed to get a crippled version of 2.1 running, I
tried to do a selective install of the printer driver.  The OS
immediately gave an error message about a possible bad CD.

IBM replaced the CD promptly, and last night I confirmed that it indeed
had been the problem.

There's nothing special about the number one.  I would guess that there
was a whole batch of bad CDs.  Mine came around the end of December.
If you have persistent install problems with vanilla hardware, this
could be a cause.
-- 
Don Altman                                 Northwest Research Associates, Inc.
dona@nwra.com                              Bellevue, WA
(206) 453-8141                             (206) 646-9123 (FAX)