Installing OS/2 SUCKS!!!

[Bungo Pony]

I've had a copy of OS/2 Warp 4.52 kicking around here for a while. Last night, I finally decided to install it on an old HD I've had kicking around. What a pain!

It has 3 boot floppies and 2 CD-ROMs. I had to get floppy updates in order for this thing to work. And it still doesn't work! I get a RSOD after the Welcome screen.

I'm now trying the install with <512M of RAM (like one site suggested).

I can definately see why this OS didn't catch on. It's a real pain to install!

Anybody have any tips on installing this thing?

[mips]

I can definately see why this OS didn't catch on. It's a real pain to install!


That has nothing to do with why OS/2 died.

You are trying to run something old on new hardware and comparing old installers to current day ones. Maybe try it in a VM like Virtualbox as I know that supports it as a guest os.

[Bungo Pony]

Actually, I'm trying to install it on older hardware. I figured I'd have a difficult time if I used a newer PC

[zmjjmz]

How old is said hardware?
I'm willing to bet anything younger than 1999 will fail.

[Bungo Pony]

It's somewhere around 1999.

The problem I seem to be running into is the fact that it's not IBM's hardware. I tried downloading a couple of patches, and it hasn't been helping (so far)

The challenge continues.

But I'd really like to play around with it. No better way to do it than install it on its own machine.

[SnappyU]

I hear your pain. :)

I was fiddling with OS/2 Warp back in 1995 or 96 ... which I believe is a special Students edition or something given away at a convention. Well, welcome back to 1990s era, a long gone time when fiddling with hardware and its drivers was needed to get anything to work reliably. ;) Wicked!

Like it or not, Windows with its vast array of drivers back then gave it the edge. And to that end, it was actually because of the effort of the OEMs that the drivers were present. However if you really think about it, in those days, drivers were like the differentiating feature of hardware companies, esp those that used common chipsets. Maybe in a twisted manner, we 'owe' it to MS' highhandedness to muscle vendors into writing drivers for its OS. In a way, it was a win-win situation for MS and the hw vendors. MS gained to maintain its market share, while hw vendors stand to gain by writing drivers for the largest pool of pc users. Monopoly? Yes. Illegal, perhaps so. Good business sense? Definitely. ;)

[ezsit]

I used OS/2 Warp versions 3 and 4 in the mid 90s and it far surpassed anything MS ever produced until Windows 2000 was released. Try installing Windows NT 3.5 or NT 4.o if you think OS/2 sucks.

However, OS/2 Warp 4 ran fine on generic hardware as long as you had decent video support (ATI, Matrox, S3, Elsa were all well supported). Today I'd be surprised if OS/2 would recognize video hard ware made after 1996-7.

Also, hard drives and bios limitations really came into play, a hard disk larger than 8GB was rare and not supported by the boot floppies and EIDE cdrom drives were hit and miss depending on chipset and driver support. Hard drive partitions were best kept to below 2GB for the boot partition and had to be kept below 2GB if the FAT filesystem was used since you were limited to FAT16.

RAM is another matter altogether since OS/2 addressed memory above the 64MB mark differently than Windows. 64MB of ram was about all you'd require under OS/2.

Lastly, USB support did not exist. Forget those USB mice, keyboards, printers, and anything else USB. Those just were not around back when OS/2 was available.

Unless you were installing on a 486 through Pentium 133, with 64MB ram, an 8GB hard drive, EIDE cdrom, soundblaster compatible audio card, with PS/2 mouse and keyboard, I doubt you had much luck.

[mike1234]

Sorry I can't help. Last time I used OS/2 was around 1991? It's just DOS and Windows. I agree with other posters that there is some HW issue involved. I often wonder if old software had a time bomb in it, or maybe Y2K issues. It should load in a virtual environment though.

M.

[Antman]

I recall running OS/2 Warp on my self-built 486 computer. CompuServe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe)used to have an OS/2 native client that I enjoyed using. I don't think I had enough ram to run OS/2 well though, and went back to running Windows. It was a good learning experience at the time.

[oldos2er]

Anybody have any tips on installing this thing?

Without knowing anything about your hardware, no.

I still miss it's object-oriented interface. There's never been anything else like it (for PCs).

[Dremora]

You probably want eComStation (http://www.ecomstation.com/).

Yes, OS/2 lives. :lolflag:

[seanc7]

My company still has two OS/2 boxes for client support of their products. Our only install anymore is copies of the original 19 diskettes! Yes, diskettes, no CDs for me if those boxes kack. :-(

OS/2 is a PITA to install. I had pretty good luck just using old P2 clone PCs with basic hardware. That way I didn't need any extra drivers to get them running.

[seanc7]

You probably want eComStation (http://www.ecomstation.com/).

Yes, OS/2 lives. :lolflag:

Hm, I'll look into this for my work too. It might be a good alternative to the 19 diskettes.

[ezsit]

Our only install anymore is copies of the original 19 diskettes! Yes, diskettes, no CDs for me if those boxes kack.

If you have the diskette version, then it has to be version 2 or 3. I would look into buying a copy on eBay of the CD version if you want. However, even the cd version require three boot diskettes to start the installation.