Installing BSD on IBM Netvista S40 - Part 5: OS/2 Installation

By Micho Durdevich <micho@matem.unam.mx>

I recently tried to install OS/2 MCP2 on my Netvista S40. The installation CD booted fine, but the install program got pretty disturbed by the existing BSD hard disk layout, and the whole experiment terminated by a trap :(

My first attempt to install something non-trivial on this faithful machine was during Q-Systems' participation in the eComStation project. I started the installation program from the eComStation CD, and selected the USB option on the preboot screen. Unfortunately, the USB drivers included in this CD were not compatible with the USB controller on the Netvista S40. The system booted fine (modulo some USB error messages) but both keyboard and mouse were unusable. I had to find better USB drivers. But how to boot the system with these better drivers? I had no USB floppy drive with me.

A natural solution was to DHCP/PXE boot the Netvista S40 from another eComStation system, making sure it would load all appropriate drivers, then launch the installer program and install the operating system locally.

This is the basic idea of a network install. A great advantage of such an installation method is that we have full control over what and how it is really loaded on the target system. And once it works fine, the install can be easily deployed on multiple identical or similar configurations over complex networks. A detailed discussion of remote-booting eComStation from eComStation can be found in our OS/2 remote-boot article (see URLs below). Here we shall only touch Netvista-specific things.

First, we have to enable USB support (at least for keyboard and mouse). This is done by including the following lines in the CONFIG.SYS file:

BASEDEV=USBD.SYS /I13
BASEDEV=USBUHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBHID.SYS

DEVICE=C:\OS2\BOOT\USBKBD.SYS
DEVICE=C:\OS2\BOOT\USBMOUSE.SYS

There is a subtle point to consider regarding USB drivers. I used MCP2 USB drivers except USBUHCD.SYS, which I took from the eComStation install CD. Only in this way did the system boot properly. The USBMOUSE.SYS driver must be loaded after MOUSE.SYS.

The HDD and CD-ROM related entries are:

BASEDEV=OS2DASD.DMD
BASEDEV=OS2LVM.DMD
BASEDEV=CHKDSK.SYS
BASEDEV=DANIS506.ADD
BASEDEV=DANIATAP.FLT

DEVICE=C:\OS2\BOOT\OS2CDROM.DMD /Q
IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\HPFS.IFS
IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS

There is a strange correlation between the (non-existent) floppy drive and the LVM program. If the following line

BASEDEV=IBM1FLPY.ADD /A:0 /FORCE:1 /U:0 /F:1.44MB

is absent, then the system will completely freeze when exiting LVM, assuming that a volume was created during the LVM session.

In order to launch the installation program properly, it is necessary to set the following variables:

SET RUNNINGECSINSTALL=YES
SET CD_DRIVELETTER=S

The following variables alter the behavior of the installation program: creation of the appropriate CONFIG.SYS file for the local installation. If we do not define these variables, nothing spectacular would happen. The installation program would simply fail to introduce a bunch of critical entries in the client's CONFIG.SYS file, and then we would have to introduce them manually.

SET CSM_DOSSUPPORT=TRUE
SET CSM_WARPCENTER=TRUE
SET CSM_OS2DASD=TRUE
SET CSM_ATAPI=1
SET JJSCDROM=FALSE
SET CSM_IDEDRIVER=1

The installation program is then started by invoking eCSMakeDisk. The first phase of the installation process passed smoothly. Before rebooting the system for the first time (the install process continues from the corresponding local volume), it was necessary to make several critical adjustments. The rest of the installation process went smoothly in a straightforward manner.

CONFIG.SYS+USB Files

First, I had to enable the corresponding USB entries in the Netvista local CONFIG.SYS file. Then, I had to copy the correct USB driver files (see above), from the eComStation server to the OS2\BOOT folder of the installation volume.

Replacing OS2LDR

Surprisingly, it turns out that the loader file installed locally fails to boot. The symptom is that when we try to boot Netvista from the corresponding installation volume after completing the first phase of the install process, nothing happens; we get just a blinking cursor. A more detailed analysis reveals that the cause for this is exactly the same cause of the troubles with FreeBSD: an ugly A20 enablement subroutine, which simply hangs due to the absence of the standard keyboard controller on the Netvista S40.

The solution is to replace original OS2LDR file (found in the root of the installation volume) with the magical OS2LDR file from FP.26. This loader file is much better designed, simpler, and is also indispensable to use it when booting eComStation from eComStation, as explained in our OS/2 remote-boot article.