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Installing OS/2:The installation itself |
Once you've got your installation diskettes sorted out so that both your source media and your target drive are visible, it's time to begin the installation.
If you're not familiar with the installation procedure for OS/2, particularly issues relating to partitioning and integrating OS/2 with other operating systems on the same drive, read the OS/2 Installation Guide.
This section covers the installation of the core operating system.
I chose to install OS/2 as the sole operating system, and to partition the 260MB drive
as a single HPFS partition. HPFS is generally suited to partitions over 100MB in size,
allows for long filenames, uses small cluster sizes to ease disk usage, but can't be read
by DOS. In fact, the only other operating system I know of that will read and write to
HPFS partitions is NT 3.51. (Partition Magic does a good job of moving or resizing HPFS
partitions, though.)
I installed using the Advanced option. I use this as a force of habit, on any piece of software.
The purpose of this installation phase is to get the operating system installed and booting on the machine, so keep it simple. Don't try to install all your hardware drivers and such like during this phase, and you'll find it progresses smoothly.
When OS/2 reboots halfway through the installation, the system may not boot. If it halts, displaying errors, then the CONFIG.SYS on the hard drive needs to be altered in the same way as that on Diskette 1 was prepared for the install. OS/2 has simply written the standard driver information into CONFIG.SYS, and so the drive ordering of the flash ROM and the PCMCIA hard drive reverts to C: and D:, respectively, whilst the drivers are being loaded.
Once you get to the graphical phase of OS/2, I recommend you choose the
following settings when prompted by the System Configuration panels:
Option |
Setting |
| Country | (as appropriate) |
| Keyboard | (as appropriate; I use US for a reasonably familiar layout) |
| Mouse | PS/2 style |
| Primary display | VGA |
| Serial device support | Support installed |
| Secondary display | none |
| CD-ROM support | (depends on your installation media) |
| Printer | (as appropriate) |
| Multimedia device support | none (ESS 688 may be auto-detected, these drivers don't work) |
| SCSI adapter support | (as appropriate) |
| Advanced Power Management | Support installed |
| PCMCIA support | No support installed |
| SCSI II Optical support | none (unless you've got a magneto-optical drive attached to a SCSI PCMCIA card) |
| Dock II configuration | No support installed |
| External Diskette drive | No support installed |
| UltraBay device swapping | No support installed |
| Infrared support | (as appropriate to your hardware configuration) |
Remember that if you install support for the Infrared port, and you don't have this
enabled in Easy-Setup, you'll get error messages each time OS/2 boots because the device
can't be located.
You're next shown the software component listings. Choose the components you want from here, keeping an eye on disk space requirements. Make sure you're not installing VoiceType (see Optional System Components), because it can't run (satisfactorily) and you'll only waste disk space. Make sure you install Multimedia Software Support, or at least the Base Multimedia Support, which will become useful when you later install support for the sound card.
Continue to feed in the diskettes, and the base operating system will be configured.
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