Yup, the drive is too big; the size is so big that the installer probably overflows and thinks it's < 35 MB. This also happens in some MS-DOS versions too IIRC.
@@danieljm1234 I have a couple retro-systems in my collection where if I install the maximum DOS supports, 64MB, the sound drivers won't work right in Windows 3.1. Reducing the RAM to 32MB allows everything to work as expected. So yes, you can have too much RAM.
There's a patched set of installer disks that allow larger disk support but yes out of the box OS/2 isn't expecting much past 2 gig in size at the most. Also, I've never found it to like partitions made by a Win 95/98/ME disk so if you make a partition outside OS/2's installer I usually a DOS 6.22 disk.
@@OzzFan1000 Yesir, I had to do this all the time since we used os/2 at my office for probably too long. We had 2ish gb drives at the time and had to do some black magic to do make it not error out.
Just some feedback from another OS/2 user. Yes, those pamphlets came with the retail box version, even the Aptiva notice. I bought my OS/2 Warp 3 Red Spine in early 1995, which I still have, and my copy has pretty much all the same pamphlets yours has. The OS/2 FDISK program cannot recognize partitions created by an FDISK newer than the OS/2 you are using. You can use the newer FDISK to remove all partitions so that the OS/2 FDISK can create it's own partitions. Also, when you created the partition using ME's FDISK, you enabled large drive support which creates FAT32 partitions even if you use a smaller size. OS/2 Warp 3 doesn't understand FAT32 partitions and cannot format them. But even if you selected No for large hard drive support, the OS/2 FDISK is still going to have the problem with > 1024 cylinders. There is a patch online to replace some files on the startup disks to enable > 1024 cylinders, but otherwise I would recommend using a drive less than 2GB. Remember in 1994 the largest drives were around ~800MB or so. Bonus tip: if you ever get OS/2 installed on bare metal hardware and are having problems with video drivers and/or startup, you can press ALT+F1 at the early stages of booting (in OS/2 3 & 4 it is when it displays OS/2 in the upper left corner) and you can boot into a "safe" mode. I hope you're able to try again and have a more positive experience!
It is absolutely amazing to me how long we kicked that can down the road. It seems to me, when drives got to be 1/10 to 1/4 the limit imposed by the number of cylinders, that was the time to start pushing out solutions to raise the limit in anticipation. Instead, we all pretty much waited until 23:59 on the last day of sub-2GB drives to do anything about it. I've got a few computers that shipped with drives over 250MB that couldn't handle drives over 500MB, and at least one that shipped with a drive around 1GB that didn't support drives over 2GB. That is insane. Like, _what did you think was going to happen?_ Drives were just gonna get smaller again?
@@nickwallette6201 I think the problem was how slow committees moved back then. Also the 2GB problem was the maximum a signed 16bit integer can address. Switching to a 32bit OS like Windows NT and patched versions of OS/2 could break the 2GB barrier. With the consumer version of Windows not going anyway, moving to a 32bit File Allocation System (a.k.a. FAT32) was able to solve the problem as well, but all of these were not DOS compatible.
@@OzzFan1000 I dunno. 16-bit real-mode was never the problem. 16-bit machines have no trouble doing 32-bit math. It might take more than one instruction, but it's not a deal-breaker -- as evidenced by later DOS versions supporting LBA and even FAT-32 without having gone 32-bit themselves. A lot gets said about how backward-compatibility was to blame, but I don't buy that either. After all, DOS had changed FAT before -- between DOS 1 and 2, when the BPB was added, and then again when moving from FAT-12 to FAT-16, and then again when moving to BIG FAT, and then LBA, and then FAT-32. New BIOS or new controller, new DOS kernel, and an update to Norton Utilities, and you were on your way. Each time we hit a hard limit -- be it the combination of BIOS and DOS structures that set the 500MB limit, or the 1024 cylinder limit, or the 8GB limit, the 32GB limit, etc. etc. -- we came out the other side with a fix. It just seemed to take up to the last possible second for it to happen. You're probably right that it was just the slow movement of committees, but man there's no excuse for that. There were like a half-dozen companies calling the shots back then. If IBM and Microsoft and Intel and Western Digital and/or Seagate all got together and decided to do something, _good luck_ opposing it! I rarely hit these limits myself back then, but I was squarely in the budget market. I wasn't ever riding the latest and greatest. But to think, even still, I was one hardware refresh cycle away from having compatibility problems... that's just silly. :-)
@@nickwallette6201 32 bit math is kind of a broad term. Do you mean floating point or integer? 286's are the last true 16 bit cpu in the x86 line and could not do 32 bit integer instructions, but an FPU used higher precision.
My friend and I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp to share around the time Windows 95 came out. We both tried it but ran into tons of driver issues and other random problems. Ended up returning it and waiting for Windows 95. It was a good choice.
I used it for about a year - Blue Spine box with Windows 3.1 built in. Great thing about it was Windows apps could crash and your machine didn't have to be rebooted due to GPF.
@@presidentkiller Well, if I'd say that in my experience, a Lada is more comfortable than a Rolls=Royce, you'd suspect that I'm a dishonest POS...and you'd be right Get off your need to help corruption
"I have never been so exicted to get OS/2 installed!" --Michael MJD IBM could have used that in their marketing material showing how excited people are to use OS/2
When I was a kid, one of the biggest computer magazines in Sweden handed out OS/2 Warp for free. It just came included with the paper. However, in the cd case they’d left a small note saying (something along the lines of) “this software is given away for free since the setup program has a minor defect. At the end of the installation it will tell you that the setup has failed. This in incorrect! The installation is successful and the system will be ready to use as soon as you reboot your computer.” I planned to install it on an older laptop that couldn’t handle Win95. Now I newer got to inherent that computer so my installation cds (with bonus pack, also included) were left unused.
The July 2000 issue of Australian Personal Computer magazine also gave away the full version of OS/2 Warp 4.0 for free on the cover CD. I'm not sure if it had the same defect. Unlike retail versions of Warp 4.0, the CD wasn't bootable, so you still had to create two or three installation floppies first, boot from those, then install from the CD, just like in this video.
@@zoomosis Cool. This was a few years earlier but interesting to see how IBM was basically willing to give away their os for free. I liked it though. My grandma worked for a company that was heavily reliant on IBM and thus used OS/2. I got to play around with her laptop a few times and really liked the look and feel of the system.
@@fredskronk I used OS/2 from 1994 and it felt extremely modern. A massive improvement over DOS, though in hindsight it also inherited some of DOS's shortcomings (as did Windows). Sadly by 1999 it became obvious IBM weren't developing OS/2 any more and I reluctantly switched to Windows NT 4.0. I missed some of OS/2's features but NT had its own advantages and was very stable. These days I run Ubuntu, though!
Here I am again watching videos about operating systems that were around when I was barely a kid questioning WHY DO I FIND THIS KINDA STUFF SO DANG INTERESTING. Another awesome video Michael.
I just want to say, my 3 year old watches your videos and just listens to your voice. He finds it soothing and it helps put him to sleep. I on the other hand love watching your videos.
OS/2 was the best OS ever. It worked for me without any problems whatsoever. I only stopped using it as nobody ever sold OS/2 versions of their software. It made me smile when years later, whilst on holiday, I spotted the Italian railway were still using it.
AMEN my friend! VERY well stated! 👍🏻 I started using OS/2 in 1995 (Warp 3) and VERY reluctantly had to switch to Windoze 98 in 2000. Using "Merlin" (Warp 4) until then. Now, I am building a dedicated OS/2 machine that will have Warp 3 and Warp 4 on it, utilizing "Dual Boot".
Michael, Out of all the computer videos that I have watched on your channel I think that THIS ONE was DEFINITELY the most entertaining because of all the trouble that you went through just to TRY to get OS2 installed on the Packard Bell🤣🤣😂😂. I think that even YOU would agree that some of the installation process was pretty FUNNY too💻🤣😂. I’m glad that you DID FINALLY get OS2 installed through a virtual machine and YES it was good that after all that FRUSTRATION😤 that you were able to demonstrate OS2💻🙏🏻. Thanks for another great video and hopefully the next one will be a lot LESS frustrating😮💨👍🏻.
What size VM hard disk did you use because I feel like your hard disk in the Packard bell might be too big. Most older operating systems cannot utilize disks larger than 1gb and most often its being read from the bios partition table. Hope this helps. Even windows 95 first revision cannot access disks larger than 1gb. I think it was the second revision when they added FAT32 support. Source: I used to be a IT hardware technician
IIRC it was under 1GB. And yeah that's the conclusion that I came to by the end of the video as well. This Packard Bell is 2 years newer than Warp 3 so its hard drive is larger than what you would've gotten on a PC from '94.
The main limit with older-ish DOS versions is 2 gigabytes per partition. Beyond 2GB you need FAT32 but the newer versions will default to FAT32 for anything over 512MB. To force FAT16 you need to choose no when it asks about large disk support. When you chose 750 megabytes I just knew it wouldn't work. Also due to CHS nonsense you will likely have the best chances of success if you stay in the first 504 megabytes of the drive.
@@MichaelMJD you show in FDISK @19:49 that the drive is 4112 MB in size. Definitely larger that the 504 MB maximum at release. If you look at the geometry that the drive is using, and keep the C partition 1023 cylinders or less you should be able to install and have the drive recognized by DOS 5 or OS/2. There are fixpacks that added enhancements to the driver that you can use instead of what came with the original GA release. I believe, but not sure, you can use the rest of the drive as HPFS with the original drivers. Lastly, yes the transition to large drives was painful, we use Ontrack drivers for DOS to support large disks.
@@MichaelMJD I just found out that today Microsoft retired the last version of Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer 11) (RIP Internet Explorer 1995 - June 15th, 2022)
Had "MS-DOS 6.22 Upgrade" on 3 floppies back in the day. To install without having any prior DOS you had to boot the installer disk, exit to the command prompt, partition and format your HDD (with all mandatory reboots), and then do sys a: c: -- after that it would "upgrade" from the barebones DOS (guess it used 6.20 for the installer) to the full 6.22 thing. Fun times 😸
I am sorry, I meant to leave a comment on your last os2 video. Os2 is quite tricky to install. It x requires a boot partition and an active partition. I think the boot partition has to be below 1024 sectors, although it was 30 years ago I installed my 2.1 version. You do need to restart after deleting the partitions. It is ms frisk which is corrupting the table, as os2 will not recognise the ms structure, which frisk adds on loading. Oh, by the way, Windows me did not use a full dos kernel, and did not have format in the kernel, like true dose versions did. Good luck.
I remember learning about OS/2 in computer history lectures. I think I recall it being mentioned that the OS Was adopted for a time by some industries to run the back end of certain devices and infrastructure?
It was. There were some die hard IBM fanboys back in the day that figured "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM." OS/2 powered some pretty important databases for banks and such for a while. Some Automated Teller Machines used OS/2 exclusively due to the lack of in-the-wild viruses for the OS and figured it was a more secure option. Even with the release of Windows 95, it didn't have the stability of OS/2 or Windows NT. But by the time NT 4.0 was released, many companies started migrating away.
Great video that shows the frustrations and perils of trying to install an older operating system on a newer computer. I suppose that even XP would be a tough install on a computer from 2017. Hey, that’s an idea for a future video, to test your patience!
Wasn't there a physical hard drive size limitation back then? 528MB was it? Maybe the software wasn't written to see above that before hard drives were able to break that limit some time later.
This video cracked me up. You were on the right track when you used fdisk from the WinMe CD to create a partition. If you had found a format command from elsewhere and formatted the FAT partition, it might have worked. *Smaller than 750 megs though, try 100 megs next time.
Oh man, this takes me back. Kind of. I just got into computers in 1994, and I remember reading about OS/2 Warp, but I've never actually used it, nor seen it. But it's still one of the earlierst computer related memories I have.
As others have said, it's the HDD being too large. It's a pretty common problem when trying to build a system based around mid to late 90s hardware and operating systems. Most operating systems and consumer PCs back then had a limit of somewhere around 500 MB, but a drive of that size was more likely to be an enterprise drive as home users would be lucky to have a 30-40MB drive on their home system at that time. I'd be willing to bet if you installed something like a 128 or 256MB drive it would probably have worked.
I'd like to see "Installing an ISA network card, but everything goes wrong" at some point, because not even I can ever install one of those things right the first time. It'd be a perfect fit for the technological chaos of the channel.
I think the issue is with HDD size. I don't have real hardware to run OS/2 and this was only tested on QEMU. When I tried installing in a 4Gb HDD image I would see the same partition table corruption you saw. Used the Windows 98 boot disk and ran at the same issues. At first I thought it was the large size question Windows 98 fdisk asks when starting, but it failed even if asked to not enable large disk support. Tried changing the image size from 4Gb to 2Gb, used the OS/2 Easy installation and it worked as expected.
This and your previous video on OS/2 2.1 perfectly illustrate why IBM was doomed to fail in the consumer space from the start. When IBM first started selling the PC in 1981, they had Microsoft to paper over the rough spots. But when IBM and Microsoft split ways, IBM constantly struggled with OS/2 while Microsoft just took over the world with Windows and Windows NT. This even though, arguably, OS/2 was the better product. But the product is no good if you can't get it to run! IBM was also making weird design choices on their "consumer" products so as to protect their products aimed at businesses. Even the PS/1, a better product than the PCjr, had the power for the system run through the monitor. They were constantly hamstringing themselves to protect their more profitable business sales, until in the end they had neither to speak of (at least in the PC world); all of the clone makers came in and ate their lunch.
When I finally gave up on my old Commodore 128D and got my very first PC (Pentium 90 FTW) I had a friend guide me through triple-booting Windows 3.11, Slackware Linux and OS/2 Warp and for a long time OS/2 was my go to OS, I loved the clunky monster. I remember it being a bitch to install even then, I remember having to make my own install floppy to even get it going. Once it was running though, it blew everything else away, at least until Windows 95 launched.
My high school in the 90's ran a mix of OS/2 on the main server, Novel Netware for profile management and regular Windows 3.11/95 on the client side. I used hack into everything to get onto the IT guy's nerves, and instead of getting in trouble, I eventually got hired to be his assistant. But I never personally got to do anything OS/2 related. I just remember seeing it on the screen through the glass door of the server rack. I have my own copy somewhere, but I never tried installing it. Having watched this video, I don't regret it.
After the previous OS/2 video you made, I downloaded the floppy set for 2.1 and tried to install it on my Pentium I machine. It worked first try, using a 635MB Western Digital hard drive. I am asuming your drive is too large which is what is causing all those issues.
I love that Packard Bell. I had a Legend 406CD with a Pentium 75MHz. The soundboard always fascinated me as I always loved how MIDI sounded. It always had a little bite. The 7th Guest and 11th Hour are good examples
i also like that you still are including Eddie in ur videos :D i remember the video where you got him along with a signed baseball and some Baseball cards :) with xp lol
Warp 3.0 & 4.0 won't install on drives larger than 8.4 GB. Not without patching the IDE driver with a newer version. Also the installation partition must be in the first 1024 sectors. Lastly, only FAT16 is supported, not FAT32. From memory FAT32 support wasn't provided until eComStation, using a third party driver.
Well virtually no one in 1994 when OS/2 3.0 came out would have had this issue. OS/2 certainly had it flaws for lacking driver support. But a 4GB hard disk drive would have been absolutely ludicrous in ordinary desktop hardware. If you wanted GBs of disk storage you would have to shill out tens of thousand's of dollars for really high end data center equipment. This was a time when most documents were still exchanged on 1,44 MB floppy disks (2X CDROM drives were slowly becoming mainstream but you couldn't burn a CD). The limitations in these old OS were necessary because they had operate in systems with small HDD and low amounts of RAM (32MB were high end, desktop boards couldn't address anything close to the 4GB a 32-bit processor could theoretically support and the modules were very expensive) so the OS's API allowed micromanaging small amounts of memory and storage while it lacked in modern ease of use. What looks like bad design today seemed like a sound choice back then (well sometimes it was just bad design) - almost nobody needed support for 4GB HDD and the like.
No! No WE didn't have these issues back then with OS/2. WE knew what we were doing, as HDD were not much above 500MB.......the partition limit of OS/2 Warp 3. As HDD sizes became larger during this time. IBM released "fix Packs" that addressed these issues. THIS is why this installation was a proverbial SHIT SHOW! The primary drive partition was set TOO high. I think the "Darwin Award" goes to YOU!
It's funny. The OS/2 logo looks really cool, but it's kinda terrible as a logo. :-) It's too reliant on the background color and its bounding box to be universally adaptable, and would lose a bit of its charm in B&W.
I just realized you have the camera's viewfinder hooked up to the monitor actually at the station of the computer youre using to avoid having the camera in the way. thats bloody genius.
Yeah it works out great! Having the camera on a tripod between me and the computer monitor makes it pretty awkward to use so I started doing that a while ago.
Bought OS/2 1.3 on sale with a free upgrade to 2.0 when it came out. Never installed 1.3 and just waited for 2.0. Installed with no issues and continued to use through 2.1 and 3.0. 3.0 was painful for me. I couldnt afford a CDROM. Went to a computer store I knew and sat at a display computer to create the 20+ floppies needed from the CDROM. Was worth it. OS/2 was some much easier to use then Windows 3.x and allowed me to have a bunch of apps open at once. Got me through college. Another Boring Topic just released awesome video on the history of OS/2
Hello, to add insult to injury, I also remember some setting in BIOSes back then, that was about some "Memory Hole for installing OS/2" or something like that. Don't remember exactly anymore, sorry. And also don't really know, if it influenced the outcome in any way, but as I saw it, Michael never entered the BIOS settings itself, which surprised me to some extent.
The only memory of installing OS2 is missing drivers and drivers it had that just didn't work. OS2 was pretty much abandoned by everyone I knew in a pretty short time. So much so that you could find people giving away boxed copies a few months after launch, that's how i got mine.
I suspect that the partition errors are due to CHS vs LBA addressing on the hard drive. If I remember correctly for CHS addressing you can't have a hard drive bigger than 504 megabytes, so the 750 megabyte partition, while tiny for today's standards, is still considered impossibly huge by 1994 standards. I would try either a smaller than 504mb hard disk, or at least creating a partition smaller than 504mb, and see if you can install OS/2 there. By the way, OS/2 is notoriously difficult to virtualize, did you use an emulator like PCem/86box or a virtualization solution like VirtualBox/VMware?
There were some installation issues when you had an Aptiva. If memory serves correctly, it was a hardware issue. That was the reason for the Aptiva notification card/paper included.
ah yay thanks for the new video.. idk why but i like the videos where nothing goes right bc i like to see you figure it out and then i dont make the mistake my self :) also, keep up the good videos i look forward to watching them!!
you cannot enable large disk support like you did from the windows me disk if you want to partition and format for os/2 from another os. you should have used the no option when asked for large disk support and then made a partition under 2 GB in size, then formatted as fat16.
It seems like the hard drive is too large for OS/2 to recognise. Try using a less than 512 MB Hard Disk and also try setting the BIOS to IDE mode if you are using AHCI. Hope that helps :)
Yep is for sure the Hard Drive size. He would need to use a hard drive of no more than 2GB. But like you said I would go with smaller. It doesn't have anything to do with AHCI as that is only for SerialATA and this computer is many years before that came out. Smaller drive an it may be ok. Even better would be to install it on a computer from 1994 or earlier. Even with an SD to IDE adapter if you don't have a small HD.
Ah, the joys of old software! One of my pet peeves to this day (this still happens) are installation errors where the only feedback you get are either generic, non-specific, error messages, or undocumented error codes. C'mon software, how am I supposed to fix the problem when you aren't giving me the first clue about what the problem is? I've got a vague memory that OS/2 Warp got quite a lot of advertising on UK TV at some point in the '90s. I didn't know anyone who used it.
I concur with the speculation of the drive being too large. I will typically use a modern Linux for doing appropriate fdisk --compatibility=dos because then you can make a 512M disk that should be below that 639M bug you saw in the installer, and allow you to start at the 63rd 512B sector.and use 0x6, the MBR partition table label for FAT16.
lol, I had this issue when I tried to install OS/2 in a Pentium 90. The problem is that depending on your system, the OS/2 itself doesn't recognize anything larger than 500mb.
Windows 98SE and Windows Me, from my experience, does *not* load format into the ram drive. Rather, you have to run the command from their respective folders on the CD. “WIN98” for Windows 98SE, and “WIN9X” for Windows Me.
Yup, the drive is too big; the size is so big that the installer probably overflows and thinks it's < 35 MB. This also happens in some MS-DOS versions too IIRC.
You're exactly right. It's a bug in OS/2 FDISK. It needs 1024 cylinders or less. There is a patch somewhere online to fix this too.
Guessing it's similar to having too much memory. I remember having issues when installing Death Rally as a kid
@@danieljm1234 I have a couple retro-systems in my collection where if I install the maximum DOS supports, 64MB, the sound drivers won't work right in Windows 3.1. Reducing the RAM to 32MB allows everything to work as expected. So yes, you can have too much RAM.
There's a patched set of installer disks that allow larger disk support but yes out of the box OS/2 isn't expecting much past 2 gig in size at the most. Also, I've never found it to like partitions made by a Win 95/98/ME disk so if you make a partition outside OS/2's installer I usually a DOS 6.22 disk.
@@OzzFan1000 Yesir, I had to do this all the time since we used os/2 at my office for probably too long. We had 2ish gb drives at the time and had to do some black magic to do make it not error out.
You know it's going to be a Michael MJD classic when the title includes "Everything Goes Wrong"
As if everything in UA-cam goes wrong.
Yes.
A *old fashion classic MJD video*
Yep
Oh yeah!
Absolutely!
edit: Im the 100th like on this comment...
Just some feedback from another OS/2 user. Yes, those pamphlets came with the retail box version, even the Aptiva notice. I bought my OS/2 Warp 3 Red Spine in early 1995, which I still have, and my copy has pretty much all the same pamphlets yours has.
The OS/2 FDISK program cannot recognize partitions created by an FDISK newer than the OS/2 you are using. You can use the newer FDISK to remove all partitions so that the OS/2 FDISK can create it's own partitions. Also, when you created the partition using ME's FDISK, you enabled large drive support which creates FAT32 partitions even if you use a smaller size. OS/2 Warp 3 doesn't understand FAT32 partitions and cannot format them. But even if you selected No for large hard drive support, the OS/2 FDISK is still going to have the problem with > 1024 cylinders.
There is a patch online to replace some files on the startup disks to enable > 1024 cylinders, but otherwise I would recommend using a drive less than 2GB. Remember in 1994 the largest drives were around ~800MB or so.
Bonus tip: if you ever get OS/2 installed on bare metal hardware and are having problems with video drivers and/or startup, you can press ALT+F1 at the early stages of booting (in OS/2 3 & 4 it is when it displays OS/2 in the upper left corner) and you can boot into a "safe" mode.
I hope you're able to try again and have a more positive experience!
It is absolutely amazing to me how long we kicked that can down the road. It seems to me, when drives got to be 1/10 to 1/4 the limit imposed by the number of cylinders, that was the time to start pushing out solutions to raise the limit in anticipation. Instead, we all pretty much waited until 23:59 on the last day of sub-2GB drives to do anything about it. I've got a few computers that shipped with drives over 250MB that couldn't handle drives over 500MB, and at least one that shipped with a drive around 1GB that didn't support drives over 2GB. That is insane. Like, _what did you think was going to happen?_ Drives were just gonna get smaller again?
@@nickwallette6201 I think the problem was how slow committees moved back then. Also the 2GB problem was the maximum a signed 16bit integer can address. Switching to a 32bit OS like Windows NT and patched versions of OS/2 could break the 2GB barrier. With the consumer version of Windows not going anyway, moving to a 32bit File Allocation System (a.k.a. FAT32) was able to solve the problem as well, but all of these were not DOS compatible.
@@OzzFan1000 I dunno. 16-bit real-mode was never the problem. 16-bit machines have no trouble doing 32-bit math. It might take more than one instruction, but it's not a deal-breaker -- as evidenced by later DOS versions supporting LBA and even FAT-32 without having gone 32-bit themselves.
A lot gets said about how backward-compatibility was to blame, but I don't buy that either. After all, DOS had changed FAT before -- between DOS 1 and 2, when the BPB was added, and then again when moving from FAT-12 to FAT-16, and then again when moving to BIG FAT, and then LBA, and then FAT-32. New BIOS or new controller, new DOS kernel, and an update to Norton Utilities, and you were on your way.
Each time we hit a hard limit -- be it the combination of BIOS and DOS structures that set the 500MB limit, or the 1024 cylinder limit, or the 8GB limit, the 32GB limit, etc. etc. -- we came out the other side with a fix. It just seemed to take up to the last possible second for it to happen.
You're probably right that it was just the slow movement of committees, but man there's no excuse for that. There were like a half-dozen companies calling the shots back then. If IBM and Microsoft and Intel and Western Digital and/or Seagate all got together and decided to do something, _good luck_ opposing it!
I rarely hit these limits myself back then, but I was squarely in the budget market. I wasn't ever riding the latest and greatest. But to think, even still, I was one hardware refresh cycle away from having compatibility problems... that's just silly. :-)
The computer itself is also too fast. As it needs to be less than about 150mhz so it doesn't barf.
@@nickwallette6201 32 bit math is kind of a broad term. Do you mean floating point or integer? 286's are the last true 16 bit cpu in the x86 line and could not do 32 bit integer instructions, but an FPU used higher precision.
My friend and I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp to share around the time Windows 95 came out. We both tried it but ran into tons of driver issues and other random problems. Ended up returning it and waiting for Windows 95. It was a good choice.
I used it for about a year - Blue Spine box with Windows 3.1 built in. Great thing about it was Windows apps could crash and your machine didn't have to be rebooted due to GPF.
Only a filthy Microsoftie can say with a straight face original Win95 was better than OS/2 WARP
@@alastorgdl Well, if in their experience Windows 95 worked better than OS/2, then IT WAS better. Get off your high horse.
@@presidentkiller Well, if I'd say that in my experience, a Lada is more comfortable than a Rolls=Royce, you'd suspect that I'm a dishonest POS...and you'd be right
Get off your need to help corruption
"I have never been so exicted to get OS/2 installed!" --Michael MJD
IBM could have used that in their marketing material showing how excited people are to use OS/2
only to be greatly disappointed by all the barriers encountered during installation
@@Zontar82 Oh the pain and agony!
@@Zontar82 ...and the fact they just installed OS/2 Warp
"Exicted" 😂
When I was a kid, one of the biggest computer magazines in Sweden handed out OS/2 Warp for free. It just came included with the paper. However, in the cd case they’d left a small note saying (something along the lines of) “this software is given away for free since the setup program has a minor defect. At the end of the installation it will tell you that the setup has failed. This in incorrect! The installation is successful and the system will be ready to use as soon as you reboot your computer.”
I planned to install it on an older laptop that couldn’t handle Win95. Now I newer got to inherent that computer so my installation cds (with bonus pack, also included) were left unused.
The July 2000 issue of Australian Personal Computer magazine also gave away the full version of OS/2 Warp 4.0 for free on the cover CD. I'm not sure if it had the same defect.
Unlike retail versions of Warp 4.0, the CD wasn't bootable, so you still had to create two or three installation floppies first, boot from those, then install from the CD, just like in this video.
@@zoomosis Cool. This was a few years earlier but interesting to see how IBM was basically willing to give away their os for free.
I liked it though. My grandma worked for a company that was heavily reliant on IBM and thus used OS/2. I got to play around with her laptop a few times and really liked the look and feel of the system.
@@fredskronk I used OS/2 from 1994 and it felt extremely modern. A massive improvement over DOS, though in hindsight it also inherited some of DOS's shortcomings (as did Windows).
Sadly by 1999 it became obvious IBM weren't developing OS/2 any more and I reluctantly switched to Windows NT 4.0. I missed some of OS/2's features but NT had its own advantages and was very stable. These days I run Ubuntu, though!
@@zoomosis Microsoft + IBM originally worked together, the OS/2 team from microsoft became Windows NT - that's why NT was so stable.
Here I am again watching videos about operating systems that were around when I was barely a kid questioning WHY DO I FIND THIS KINDA STUFF SO DANG INTERESTING. Another awesome video Michael.
You like it when you see "but Everything Goes Wrong", you already know this is gonna be a wild video. And you already know it's gonna be a good one.
Your right mate!
The format command is found inside the Win9x folder on the Windows ME disc. Same for 98 (Win98 folder) and 95 too I believe.
there's also a bunch of stuff in the TOOLS\OLDMSDOS folder
I just want to say, my 3 year old watches your videos and just listens to your voice. He finds it soothing and it helps put him to sleep. I on the other hand love watching your videos.
That's a bit weird ngl...
@@aideno516 how
It's fitting for this channel that the one video where nothing went wrong is the macOS Ventura Developer Beta installation.
OS/2 was the best OS ever. It worked for me without any problems whatsoever. I only stopped using it as nobody ever sold OS/2 versions of their software. It made me smile when years later, whilst on holiday, I spotted the Italian railway were still using it.
AMEN my friend! VERY well stated! 👍🏻
I started using OS/2 in 1995 (Warp 3) and VERY reluctantly had to switch to Windoze 98 in 2000. Using "Merlin" (Warp 4) until then.
Now, I am building a dedicated OS/2 machine that will have Warp 3 and Warp 4 on it, utilizing "Dual Boot".
Michael,
Out of all the computer videos that I have watched on your channel I think that THIS ONE was DEFINITELY the most entertaining because of all the trouble that you went through just to TRY to get OS2 installed on the Packard Bell🤣🤣😂😂. I think that even YOU would agree that some of the installation process was pretty FUNNY
too💻🤣😂. I’m glad that you DID FINALLY get OS2 installed through a virtual machine and YES it was good that after all that FRUSTRATION😤 that you were able to demonstrate
OS2💻🙏🏻. Thanks for another great video and hopefully the next one will be a lot LESS frustrating😮💨👍🏻.
What size VM hard disk did you use because I feel like your hard disk in the Packard bell might be too big. Most older operating systems cannot utilize disks larger than 1gb and most often its being read from the bios partition table. Hope this helps. Even windows 95 first revision cannot access disks larger than 1gb. I think it was the second revision when they added FAT32 support. Source: I used to be a IT hardware technician
IIRC it was under 1GB. And yeah that's the conclusion that I came to by the end of the video as well. This Packard Bell is 2 years newer than Warp 3 so its hard drive is larger than what you would've gotten on a PC from '94.
The main limit with older-ish DOS versions is 2 gigabytes per partition. Beyond 2GB you need FAT32 but the newer versions will default to FAT32 for anything over 512MB. To force FAT16 you need to choose no when it asks about large disk support. When you chose 750 megabytes I just knew it wouldn't work.
Also due to CHS nonsense you will likely have the best chances of success if you stay in the first 504 megabytes of the drive.
@@MichaelMJD you show in FDISK @19:49 that the drive is 4112 MB in size. Definitely larger that the 504 MB maximum at release. If you look at the geometry that the drive is using, and keep the C partition 1023 cylinders or less you should be able to install and have the drive recognized by DOS 5 or OS/2. There are fixpacks that added enhancements to the driver that you can use instead of what came with the original GA release.
I believe, but not sure, you can use the rest of the drive as HPFS with the original drivers.
Lastly, yes the transition to large drives was painful, we use Ontrack drivers for DOS to support large disks.
@@MichaelMJD I just found out that today Microsoft retired the last version of Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer 11) (RIP Internet Explorer 1995 - June 15th, 2022)
Man, thanks to MJD I started watching dankpods, and just as I finished binge watching his content mjd posts a video.
Always keeping me entertained :)
Had "MS-DOS 6.22 Upgrade" on 3 floppies back in the day. To install without having any prior DOS you had to boot the installer disk, exit to the command prompt, partition and format your HDD (with all mandatory reboots), and then do sys a: c: -- after that it would "upgrade" from the barebones DOS (guess it used 6.20 for the installer) to the full 6.22 thing. Fun times 😸
My father was very enthusiastic about OS/2 Warp back in the 90s. I think there were three of us at my high school who used it. I loved it.
In 10 years this man will install Windows 11 and everything will already be wrong.
hit (xp), miss (vista), hit (7), miss (8), hit (10), miss (11)
is the windows release pattern
so I'm sticking with 10 until windows 12 (?) comes out
@@4rumani dude Windows 12 is already out. MJD even made a video out of it XD
@@novictorya7551 no that's linux lite
@@notthatntg c'mon man work with me
@@notthatntgshhhh
I am sorry, I meant to leave a comment on your last os2 video. Os2 is quite tricky to install. It x requires a boot partition and an active partition. I think the boot partition has to be below 1024 sectors, although it was 30 years ago I installed my 2.1 version.
You do need to restart after deleting the partitions. It is ms frisk which is corrupting the table, as os2 will not recognise the ms structure, which frisk adds on loading.
Oh, by the way, Windows me did not use a full dos kernel, and did not have format in the kernel, like true dose versions did.
Good luck.
I remember learning about OS/2 in computer history lectures. I think I recall it being mentioned that the OS Was adopted for a time by some industries to run the back end of certain devices and infrastructure?
It was. There were some die hard IBM fanboys back in the day that figured "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM." OS/2 powered some pretty important databases for banks and such for a while. Some Automated Teller Machines used OS/2 exclusively due to the lack of in-the-wild viruses for the OS and figured it was a more secure option. Even with the release of Windows 95, it didn't have the stability of OS/2 or Windows NT. But by the time NT 4.0 was released, many companies started migrating away.
OS/2 Warp 3.0 came out around the time a 2GB hard drive was massive. So, that pretty much explains that.
Great video that shows the frustrations and perils of trying to install an older operating system on a newer computer. I suppose that even XP would be a tough install on a computer from 2017. Hey, that’s an idea for a future video, to test your patience!
Wasn't there a physical hard drive size limitation back then? 528MB was it? Maybe the software wasn't written to see above that before hard drives were able to break that limit some time later.
This video cracked me up. You were on the right track when you used fdisk from the WinMe CD to create a partition. If you had found a format command from elsewhere and formatted the FAT partition, it might have worked. *Smaller than 750 megs though, try 100 megs next time.
3 years watching this channel I can finally say the this is my go to "Everything Goes Wrong.." channel 🙂
Finally a return to form. I was concerned after the last video :P
If you pitched this idea for a UA-cam channel you'd get laughed out the room. Yet somehow I thoroughly enjoy all your videos 😁
Dafak you on about?
What?
???????
@@Dan-379 I'm not sure you're asking a valid question sorry ????? Try communicating like a civilised human being.
Oh man, this takes me back. Kind of. I just got into computers in 1994, and I remember reading about OS/2 Warp, but I've never actually used it, nor seen it. But it's still one of the earlierst computer related memories I have.
As others have said, it's the HDD being too large. It's a pretty common problem when trying to build a system based around mid to late 90s hardware and operating systems. Most operating systems and consumer PCs back then had a limit of somewhere around 500 MB, but a drive of that size was more likely to be an enterprise drive as home users would be lucky to have a 30-40MB drive on their home system at that time. I'd be willing to bet if you installed something like a 128 or 256MB drive it would probably have worked.
I'd like to see "Installing an ISA network card, but everything goes wrong" at some point, because not even I can ever install one of those things right the first time. It'd be a perfect fit for the technological chaos of the channel.
Thanks for the share. Amazing how much has changed in 30 years. I remember installing it myself. What a pain!!!
I think the issue is with HDD size. I don't have real hardware to run OS/2 and this was only tested on QEMU. When I tried installing in a 4Gb HDD image I would see the same partition table corruption you saw.
Used the Windows 98 boot disk and ran at the same issues. At first I thought it was the large size question Windows 98 fdisk asks when starting, but it failed even if asked to not enable large disk support.
Tried changing the image size from 4Gb to 2Gb, used the OS/2 Easy installation and it worked as expected.
This is because it uses a 32-bit integer for the drive size, in bytes.
".. Because hopefully, we're gonna have better success with OS/2 Warp version 3 here today"
*Looks at title nervously*
This and your previous video on OS/2 2.1 perfectly illustrate why IBM was doomed to fail in the consumer space from the start. When IBM first started selling the PC in 1981, they had Microsoft to paper over the rough spots. But when IBM and Microsoft split ways, IBM constantly struggled with OS/2 while Microsoft just took over the world with Windows and Windows NT. This even though, arguably, OS/2 was the better product. But the product is no good if you can't get it to run! IBM was also making weird design choices on their "consumer" products so as to protect their products aimed at businesses. Even the PS/1, a better product than the PCjr, had the power for the system run through the monitor. They were constantly hamstringing themselves to protect their more profitable business sales, until in the end they had neither to speak of (at least in the PC world); all of the clone makers came in and ate their lunch.
OS/2 doesn't have any significant advantage over Windows NT.
When I finally gave up on my old Commodore 128D and got my very first PC (Pentium 90 FTW) I had a friend guide me through triple-booting Windows 3.11, Slackware Linux and OS/2 Warp and for a long time OS/2 was my go to OS, I loved the clunky monster. I remember it being a bitch to install even then, I remember having to make my own install floppy to even get it going. Once it was running though, it blew everything else away, at least until Windows 95 launched.
My high school in the 90's ran a mix of OS/2 on the main server, Novel Netware for profile management and regular Windows 3.11/95 on the client side. I used hack into everything to get onto the IT guy's nerves, and instead of getting in trouble, I eventually got hired to be his assistant. But I never personally got to do anything OS/2 related. I just remember seeing it on the screen through the glass door of the server rack. I have my own copy somewhere, but I never tried installing it. Having watched this video, I don't regret it.
What a throwback, OS/2 days are something else - despite the challenges you got this well figured out man!
I can't go a week without my dose of everything going wrong
After the previous OS/2 video you made, I downloaded the floppy set for 2.1 and tried to install it on my Pentium I machine. It worked first try, using a 635MB Western Digital hard drive. I am asuming your drive is too large which is what is causing all those issues.
I can imagine just how happy you are.
Getting OS/2 to work again is really struggling.
I love the boot and shutdown sound
Because it sounds likes old televised game
I love that Packard Bell. I had a Legend 406CD with a Pentium 75MHz. The soundboard always fascinated me as I always loved how MIDI sounded. It always had a little bite. The 7th Guest and 11th Hour are good examples
i also like that you still are including Eddie in ur videos :D i remember the video where you got him along with a signed baseball and some Baseball cards :) with xp lol
" but everything goes wrong" is my favorite UA-cam series.
We're back to everything going wrong.
Phew! That whole thing with the Ventura beta going well had me worried there for a bit.
I love your videos so much Michael mjd they are good videos about computers keep up the good work
I like that 1990s UI vibe in OS/2. Feels consistent and less distracting than chaos we have nowadays.
Warp 3.0 & 4.0 won't install on drives larger than 8.4 GB. Not without patching the IDE driver with a newer version. Also the installation partition must be in the first 1024 sectors. Lastly, only FAT16 is supported, not FAT32. From memory FAT32 support wasn't provided until eComStation, using a third party driver.
Much smaller than 8.4GB with the default drivers actually. Probably 528MB for the Warp 3 drivers.
"using os/2 will help you learn os/2" is the best statement I've ever heard
18:57 Michael mjd first laugh
When he said "it's the same thing!" At 19:00, he soundrd like the narrator from Stanley Parable
This whole series is a rollercoaster of emotions lol
You know when it has “But everything goes wrong” in the title you know you’re in for a wild ride 😂
Is been a while since I've heard that song at the start, I thought you would never use it again and I'm glad is making a return here
Darwin award goes to "OS/2", imagine going through these for just installation when compared to Win 3.1 :D
Well virtually no one in 1994 when OS/2 3.0 came out would have had this issue. OS/2 certainly had it flaws for lacking driver support. But a 4GB hard disk drive would have been absolutely ludicrous in ordinary desktop hardware. If you wanted GBs of disk storage you would have to shill out tens of thousand's of dollars for really high end data center equipment. This was a time when most documents were still exchanged on 1,44 MB floppy disks (2X CDROM drives were slowly becoming mainstream but you couldn't burn a CD). The limitations in these old OS were necessary because they had operate in systems with small HDD and low amounts of RAM (32MB were high end, desktop boards couldn't address anything close to the 4GB a 32-bit processor could theoretically support and the modules were very expensive) so the OS's API allowed micromanaging small amounts of memory and storage while it lacked in modern ease of use. What looks like bad design today seemed like a sound choice back then (well sometimes it was just bad design) - almost nobody needed support for 4GB HDD and the like.
No! No WE didn't have these issues back then with OS/2. WE knew what we were doing, as HDD were not much above 500MB.......the partition limit of OS/2 Warp 3. As HDD sizes became larger during this time. IBM released "fix Packs" that addressed these issues. THIS is why this installation was a proverbial SHIT SHOW!
The primary drive partition was set TOO high.
I think the "Darwin Award" goes to YOU!
@@johannespfister8934 Thank you! You are 100% correct. OS/2 was the BEST of OS's.
The format utility is inside WIN9X directory of CD, which is a part of Windows setup program
OS/2’s logo is really nice but it looks like it could be a screensaver. (Not sure if it actually is)
It's funny. The OS/2 logo looks really cool, but it's kinda terrible as a logo. :-) It's too reliant on the background color and its bounding box to be universally adaptable, and would lose a bit of its charm in B&W.
Awesome video, Michael!
I just realized you have the camera's viewfinder hooked up to the monitor actually at the station of the computer youre using to avoid having the camera in the way. thats bloody genius.
Yeah it works out great! Having the camera on a tripod between me and the computer monitor makes it pretty awkward to use so I started doing that a while ago.
>OS/2
>Everything goes wrong
>Again
Very interesting.
Everything naturally goes wrong for Michael MJD and that makes for quality content!
Well it can't be a MJD video without something going wrong
LOL / this is so funny because I recall having problems installing OS/2 when it was current. Thanks for the video.
IBM OS/2 is a nightmare to install even in a VM
A full emulator like QEMU or PCem May be better
OS/2 Warp was ahead of it's time.
I would've loved to see this succeed but it's not that great.
Bought OS/2 1.3 on sale with a free upgrade to 2.0 when it came out. Never installed 1.3 and just waited for 2.0. Installed with no issues and continued to use through 2.1 and 3.0.
3.0 was painful for me. I couldnt afford a CDROM. Went to a computer store I knew and sat at a display computer to create the 20+ floppies needed from the CDROM. Was worth it.
OS/2 was some much easier to use then Windows 3.x and allowed me to have a bunch of apps open at once. Got me through college.
Another Boring Topic just released awesome video on the history of OS/2
Hello, to add insult to injury, I also remember some setting in BIOSes back then, that was about some "Memory Hole for installing OS/2" or something like that. Don't remember exactly anymore, sorry. And also don't really know, if it influenced the outcome in any way, but as I saw it, Michael never entered the BIOS settings itself, which surprised me to some extent.
The only memory of installing OS2 is missing drivers and drivers it had that just didn't work. OS2 was pretty much abandoned by everyone I knew in a pretty short time. So much so that you could find people giving away boxed copies a few months after launch, that's how i got mine.
I suspect that the partition errors are due to CHS vs LBA addressing on the hard drive.
If I remember correctly for CHS addressing you can't have a hard drive bigger than 504 megabytes, so the 750 megabyte partition, while tiny for today's standards, is still considered impossibly huge by 1994 standards. I would try either a smaller than 504mb hard disk, or at least creating a partition smaller than 504mb, and see if you can install OS/2 there.
By the way, OS/2 is notoriously difficult to virtualize, did you use an emulator like PCem/86box or a virtualization solution like VirtualBox/VMware?
Can't be an Micheal MJD video without "Everything Goes Wrong".
i like how in every video that xp "trustman" is staring into my soul.
Everything Goes Wrong..........
Is The Classic MJD Words
There were some installation issues when you had an Aptiva. If memory serves correctly, it was a hardware issue.
That was the reason for the Aptiva notification card/paper included.
If you try ancient OSes you may want to use the jumper setting for your IDE drive to limit the size AFAIK it solves most compatibility issues
IIRC, the "Sources and Solutions" catalog, was bundled wuth versions 3/Warp and 4.x/Warp. I had the same contents you got with yours.
Just imagine having been at the IBM support desk in 1994 😰
So glad I never had the problems of OS2 in my life for sure.
Technically does that mean Windows 3.x Also Goes Wrong Instantaneously?
Makes this a Double Feature...
OMG! The old and good OS/2 Warp! I used it many ears ago. No Windows, no Mac, just Warp 3 in my computer those days!!!!
this is why everything went wrong videos are great gives you a great time great videos man
ah yay thanks for the new video.. idk why but i like the videos where nothing goes right bc i like to see you figure it out and then i dont make the mistake my self :) also, keep up the good videos i look forward to watching them!!
@michaeljd which model Packard Bell is that? It looks like the one I had during high school. So many memories with that PC.
Watching this at 5:18 AM feels great!
Nice to know that OS/2 thinks your Harddrive is both 2TB and 700MB at the same time
And 63MB
you cannot enable large disk support like you did from the windows me disk if you want to partition and format for os/2 from another os. you should have used the no option when asked for large disk support and then made a partition under 2 GB in size, then formatted as fat16.
A great video to watch while updating a Windows VM. Thanks MJD!
It seems like the hard drive is too large for OS/2 to recognise. Try using a less than 512 MB Hard Disk and also try setting the BIOS to IDE mode if you are using AHCI. Hope that helps :)
Yep is for sure the Hard Drive size. He would need to use a hard drive of no more than 2GB. But like you said I would go with smaller. It doesn't have anything to do with AHCI as that is only for SerialATA and this computer is many years before that came out. Smaller drive an it may be ok. Even better would be to install it on a computer from 1994 or earlier. Even with an SD to IDE adapter if you don't have a small HD.
Ah, the joys of old software! One of my pet peeves to this day (this still happens) are installation errors where the only feedback you get are either generic, non-specific, error messages, or undocumented error codes. C'mon software, how am I supposed to fix the problem when you aren't giving me the first clue about what the problem is?
I've got a vague memory that OS/2 Warp got quite a lot of advertising on UK TV at some point in the '90s. I didn't know anyone who used it.
I concur with the speculation of the drive being too large. I will typically use a modern Linux for doing appropriate fdisk --compatibility=dos because then you can make a 512M disk that should be below that 639M bug you saw in the installer, and allow you to start at the 63rd 512B sector.and use 0x6, the MBR partition table label for FAT16.
7:29 Yes, I'm still wondering will it blend? : )
lol, I had this issue when I tried to install OS/2 in a Pentium 90. The problem is that depending on your system, the OS/2 itself doesn't recognize anything larger than 500mb.
How I love this old OS software. It was always a pain
Michael, Format is on the windows ME Disk, it's in D:\Win9x folder
Windows 98SE and Windows Me, from my experience, does *not* load format into the ram drive. Rather, you have to run the command from their respective folders on the CD. “WIN98” for Windows 98SE, and “WIN9X” for Windows Me.
Wow this is an adventure love these videos
It's great you got it working in the VM at least!
I had this running on thermwood 5th axis router. I think it's the last version of os2/warp
Michael MJD:
We suffer through installing old operating systems on systems that weren't designed for them so you don't have to
I used OS/2 Warp when I worked at a bank back in the before time.
@MichaelMJD, the format tool is in D:\Win9x folder ;)