So I had travelled a long way to pickup the 385XD, and even though I found out while turning it on that it didn’t have an OS that wasn’t a dealbreaker for me, it just made it more fun. B ut I did not expect that installing an OS would be such a headache, primaraly because I was woefully unprepared.
- I didn’t have a CD reader/writer or CDS
- I didn’t have a floppy disk reader (That my other computers could use) or floppy disks
So that left me with no way to interface with the machine, how on earth do I get data there?
Well I checked what could arrive on Amazon quickly, and soon arrived the CD writer, CD’s, and floppy disks.
Lets get started right?
So I went to archive.org and found the images for OS/2 Warp 4.
I assumed due to googling that I could boot with the CD-ROM. Turn’s out that is true…if you have the boot floppy disks that are required to then pivot to using the CD-ROM.
Much time was wasted there, but we can move on.
I extracted the .dsk files from the ISO, along with the EXE to write them with. But when I tried to transfer the data to my 365XD (which had both a CD and floppy drive) I learned (or suspected) that the CD Drive was not functioning properly, as no matter what I did I could not get it to read CD’s properly. Instead all the CD’s would just show up as tracks that were unreadable.
Ok, so the dillema now is that I need to get these .DSK files to the 365XD. My software development brain instantly went to just connecting it to the network and hosting the files with a simple python http server on my other computer, which is exactly what I did and worked amazing. This is a strategy to transfer data to these older devices that I will keep in my back pocket.
Finally I had my boot floppies. But when I tried to use them I would get some errors during the process and then when it came time to read the CD-ROM, it just would not work.
Turns out my IDE Drive was dead…nice…
So I took out the hard drive from the Scuffed 600E I had, put it in, and voala I was making progress. But that was shortlived, as there were the reminants of a windows 98 OS/Partition there and while I was able to get the OS/2 installation to finish, it would just keep trying to boot into Windows 98 and fail.
My thought process went to, well, I don’t want to dual boot, I want to have only OS/2.
But during the install I didn’t get any options to re-format or partition my drive. (Something that everyone else was getting)
So I checked and for some reason my CD-ROM image didn’t have the LVM application, so I downloaded another one that did. But now I am getting other inconsistent errors.
I wonder if this is because the floppy .dsk’s need to be from the identical .ISO in order to function (which I am 90% sure they are from anyway).
I realized the errors I were getting were related to the drive and partitioning. So the next priority in my head was the following:
Clean up the drive, set new partitions
Since I could not find a way to do it within the OS/2 installer, and was unable to create Windows 98 Boot Recovery Disk directly since I was missing some files.
So I downloaded an .img for the Windows 98 Boot, transfered it to the 365XD via HTTP, and then added it to the Floppy disk.
After deleting the existing partitions and creating a new one with FAT 16. The installer made progress but still didn’t work.
Thats when I realized my 98 Boot Image was missing format.com (Whats the point of partitioning a drive if you can’t format it), so I transfered that over and formatted the C:/ drive.
I found a new image on winworld, setup my CD and Floppies
So it got me further, and I was even able to get to the “Advanced Mode” installation going… but then it froze at 50% and would not budge. And any attempts after that failed, not matter what formatting, or partition I tried.
The main issue is that if I didn’t format the drives with my Windows 98 floppy, then the OS/2 Installer would crap out early because it could not find a C:/ drive. __BUT if I did format and partition the drives with the 98 boot floppy then OS/2 would simply say there is not enough storage (was detecting less than 100mb on the partitions). So I am stuck at an impasse.