PE> Ok, well my theory that disabling LBA on the drive
PE> would allow me to install OS/2 was false.  It DID make the
PE> partition actually get added to boot-manager, but that's all.

Its important to bear in mind that there are two quite separate
problems, what FDISK etc thinks is acceptible as the location of
an installable partition, and whether it works properly or not.

On further thought after my one yesterday, IBM may well just be
choosing to take the easy way out on the >1024 cylinder stuff.
Instead of trying to work our when its acceptible over 1024 cylinders,
just decide that it never is on an IDE drive using LBA coz thats easier.

PE> I still get the "Operating system missing, system halted"
PE> message. I also tried installing OS/2 2.1, and that also failed,
PE> although it didn't corrupt my HD on the way (from memory).

You really need to try that more carefully, very carefully zeroing out
the first physical sector on the drive and attempting the whole thing
over again with 2.1 to be quite sure its not getting rather confused
about odd effects involved with enabling and disabling LBA on the fly etc.

PE> I guess I'm after a definitive test here, because I've been
PE> trying lots of combinations and getting nowhere very quickly!

Well, you really need to start from scratch, actually zeroing out
the data in the first physical sector when say booted from a DOS
floppy and keep doing that on a whole empty drive, with a careful
testing of the various LBA type alternatives for that drive too.

I presume you have checked the APARs on that question ?

PE> BTW, in my BIOS I don't actually get a choice of choosing
PE> LBA vs LARGE vs something-else, I just get an option for
PE> each drive as to whether I have LBA enabled or not.

Yeah, there are those two alternative ways of doing it. The Award
bios is the very common one which has the elegant choice of the
three alts of NORMAL, LBA or LARGE in the HDD AUTOCONFIG entry.

I've already forgotten what you have bios wise.

PE> In fact, I can't even set the parameters for my
PE> last 2 disk drives, only the first 2.  Strange.

Are you talking about the auto detect ?  Or was your the one which
just noticed the extra drive when you booted with it plugged in ?

PE> Anyway, I got two versions of OS/2, and a completely
PE> trashable 2.5 gig drive.  What's the way forward?

Well, you could go thru it like I said, carefully. Even including
the Linux FDISK etc as well which you have the code for too.

The most obvious gotcha is that some FDISKs etc can get seriously
confused about what they see in the first physical sector on a drive.
You really do need to zero out all the bytes in that sector when booted
from say a bootable DOS floppy, using something like Nortons DiskEdit
WHENEVER you change something like the LBA for that drive, or a different
version of OS/2 etc and see if you can see any obvious pattern there.

Corse you really need to repeat it all over again
with a completely different motherboard/bios to see if
its something like that which is confusing OS/2 on that
stuff. And your old 486 aint good enough coz it aint got LBA.

One approach might be to put that 2.5GB drive on say
the Begleys machine to try that sort of thing etc.

PE> Being able to boot from partitions not completely contained
PE> in the first 504 meg partition would be nice too!!!

Yeah, it would be handy to be able to do that. Corse what with Merlin
coming, that may radically change the detail too, you could easily
spend a lot of time farting around with Warp working out what it is
fussy about on that only to find they fixed that blemish with Merlin too.
@EOT:

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