🚀 go-pugleaf

mckenney@talos.UUCP (Frank McKenney) writes:

>I need to have OS/2 operational on my office machine within the
>next six months or so. I have been able to borrow copies of IBM
>OS/2 1.1 and 1.2 for testing, but so far I have not been able to
>boot either a 1.1 or a 1.2 Installation diskette.

I'm in virtually the same situation, except my clone is an early
Toshiba 386 and I've only been able to try 1.2.  Read on...

>Attempting to boot with either OS/2 Installation Diskette causes
>the A: drive to spin, and the following message on the monitor:
>
>    A disk read error occurred.
>    Insert a system diskette and restart
>    the system.
>
>I am using the 1.44Mb drive under DOS 3.3 on a regular basis and
>seeing no problems. Both the system and keyboard BIOS chips have
>been upgraded to what is supposed to be the "current" level.
>Everex says that they "don't support" IBM OS/2, but won't offer
>any suggestions as to WHY IBM OS/2 won't run on my machine.

The problem on my machine was a bug (apparently) in the Award BIOS.
For some reason it sets up the BIOS area of RAM with a pointer to 
a drive table which specifies only 15 sectors per track (0Fh), not
the 18 (12h) sectors of a 1.4MB drive.  It's been a couple months
since I looked into this so I've forgotten some of it, but basically
it boiled down to the fact that the IBM OS/2 boot record assumes you
can read a full track right from the start, and that's not possible
with an incorrect parameter table.

My solution was to hack the IBM boot record so that it first changes
the pointer (at 0:0078h?) to point at a valid drive table (yes, there
IS one in the BIOS; god knows why it's not used), and then continue
with whatever it did before.  Took a bit of experimentation, but
eventually it worked--loaded OS2LDR, transferred control, brought
up the IBM banner...and died a horrible death.

After asking around, the consensus of local gurus and Folks With
Opinions was that RAM crunch was at fault--I only had 2MB at the time.  
So I finally installed another 2MB just this past weekend, and it 
STILL doesn't work.  I haven't had a chance to call Toshiba about 
this yet, but I'm wondering if the BIOS is just too old (dates from 
around 1987, I believe).  The next question, of course, is whether
I can get a BIOS upgrade from Toshiba.

Anyway, I'd REALLY like to know that IBM OS/2 works on this machine
before I take the plunge.  Toshiba does have their own version, but
they haven't even released 1.2 yet (it's supposedly due the 15th),
and I'll be long since in my grave by the time they finally release
their 2.0.  Perhaps more to the point, I own a copy of PC-DOS 3.0, 
which at one time was worth a $125 discount on IBM OS/2.  I don't 
suppose anybody knows if that offer still stands?

So I'm continuing to check into things.  In the meantime, if you'd
care to try fooling with the boot record, send e-mail and I'll mail
out a debug script or something.  You'll have to do some sleuthing 
to find where the correct drive parameter table is in your own BIOS,
but that's all that should be necessary.  With any luck at all, *yours*
will work with just the boot record patch...

Greg