Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!ucsd!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!ira.uka.de!smurf!wrkof!cat!martin From: martin@cat.uucp (Thomas Martin) Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc Subject: Problem with installing OS/2 Message-ID: <1990Sep6.184132.22791@cat.uucp> Date: 6 Sep 90 18:41:32 GMT Organization: C.A.T. Kommunikations-System Lines: 59 I have a problem installing OS/2 Vs. 1.2 (the IBM Version on 3.5"HD disks) on a Alps 386/16Mhz (no SX), 4MB RAM, ALPS BIOS dated 06/02/89, equipped with an Expert800 VGA board and a Seagate 4096. When inserting the install disk and booting, the system responds after approx. 3 seconds with the error message: "A disk read error occured. Insert a system d isk and restart the system." The same set of disks works without any problem o n our PS/2 Mod. 70. and Mod. 80. My investigation results so far are: Regardless, whether the OS/2 disks contain system files or not, this error message is always displayed. E.g. when insert ing Disk 5 (without any system) and rebooting the computer, the above mentioned error message occurs. I tried copying the disks to disks wh ich were formatted by the Alps386 and diskcopied them without any results. Rega rdless whether the disks where copied and/or formatted on the original PS/2 or the Alps386, all disks compared OK and always worked properly on the PS/2 and c aused this error message on the Alps386. The 3.5" disk drive is correctly set up as drive A: and identified as an 1.44MB drive to the BIOS. And so far I never had any problems concerning this disk dr ive. Even using it as a boot drive for DOS works fine. DOS boots without any pr oblems. The next step I tried was checking the boot sector of the OS/2 install disk, which disguised that the error message is part of the boot sector and no BIOS e rror message. So the drive seems to work fine. Then I tried booting from the In stall disk on a Toshiba 1200XE with 1MB RAM. Again, an error message occured bu t this time concerning not enough memory (again this message is a boot sector based error message). Furthermore, I tried installing OS/2 1.0 and 1.1 but both attempts failed causi ng exactly the same error message like 1.2. Finally, I just copied the OS/2 system files to a blank disk and booted. The re sult was a "Non-system disk" error message on the Alps386 though the PS/2 boote d without any problems from this disk. :-( The only cause for this problem I see now is, that while booting, OS/2 checks s ome BIOS routines and either does not find the proper routine to access the disk drive (meaning the error message does mean what is says) or OS/2 (the IBM Version!) looks out for some PS/2-special parts of the BIOS and this error message simply means that the (IBM)OS/2 Version would not be allowed to run on (not) 100%-compatible PC's. The question now is whether anybody ever encountered the same problem, whether it can be solved patching the disks or whether the only way is to find a new (a nd more compatible) BIOS. I would appreciate any help and hints how to solve this problem because I can n ot believe that OS/2 will only run on 'original' PS/2 or AT models. Thanks in advance, Thomas Martin --- Thomas Martin (martin@cat.uucp) C.A.T. Kommunikations-System, Frankfurt