Back From The Dead
Well time for another exciting tech tip as we stumble along the shadow of the valley of dead computers. I know that most people will say OS/2 what is that, but this week is detailing the OS/2 trick to revival. I recently encountered this beast while working on a voicemail system that was about 16 years old. It was a good voicemail system and didn't need anything fancy so OS/2 fit the bill at the time. The first word of advice I would have is to make sure you have plenty of medicine by your working space of choice as OS/2 is not around for obvious reasons which you will later discover and need this for. The biggest problem I found with the operating system was it is not very "user frinedly". I say this because a couple of things I did while restoring expected you to just except the factor that it happened just like magic. I like the simplistic "I completed" message and see why it helps to enforce our users into thinking everythings okay. Try not getting one with OS/2 by doing a copy and you will understand if you don't go insane from the lack of the message.
Okay so for the first tip here is what I would reccomend if the system boots yet does not go into a GUI interface. OS/2 has a commandline editor called tedit. With this you can edit a file such as config.sys which tells the computer what to do and what drivers and devices to load after it has succesfully turned on. The line we will be concerned with is the one that say SET PROTSHELL = ..... First type REM in front of this line and then type in the directory of the OS/2 in my case SET PROTSHELL=C:\OS2\CMD.EXE you don't have to capitalize it all but if you notice most of the file is all caps so let's stick with the normal. now press F2 which saves and then f3 to quit the tedit program. Now that you have this step done you can issue the shutdown -y command. I found this amusing to see they had a third party app just to shutdown the operating system. Once the system comes back you will be at a command line. Most of the problems I have had with OS/2 involve the disk gone south scenario so I use the ever familiar sounding chkdsk command. There is one big difference between chkdsk on OS/2. It has options after the /f:x with x being the level of chkdsk. for more information see this link I normally also include the /V for vverbose information. Be patient with this command because sometimes it takes a while to run the command and this may be a good time to grab a snack. My recover took about 1.5 hours on a tiny 4 GB drive. If I didn't say it already I now know why OS/2 is not around.
The Second Level of debug. Okay so now we know that the problem isn't in the filesystem or is it? in my case a file had become corrupted and the only way to truely find the culprit is by going through the config.sys file. The easiest way is to start first by loading the pmshell. If this comes back with a blank screen or an error then a file for your shell is corrupted and recovery is most likely going to happen by mailing it to a hard drive recovery specialist. This was the case with my restore. After receiving the recovered img file back I restored it to a newly acquired 50 pin SCSI hard drive and precedded to boot the system.
The Last level, or so we hope, of troubleshooting is to once again logically step through the boot order of the system in question. The first change I would recommend if you haven't already done it is to REM out the command you previously created in step one and un-REM out the original command. Now if you have luck you should at least get into the GUI interface but the voicemail system application won't start. At this point it is just looking through the files in question. Once word of advice I have it to use tedit to look through the lines in the cmd files that launch the applications you are having problems with. In my case the person was smart enough to write a routine that says if you have an error then just exit. This is really fun because you type the command, you see the window pop up, you see words and then it just closes. No error, no bells, no whistles. If you REM out the EXIT line it won't close the window and you can see what the command line was complaining about before the untimely close of the window and this will lead you to the source file. In my case I was missing one DLL which luckily enough I had on a CD.
Maybe Next Time I will cover restoring an IMG file. It's really easy but sometimes what is right in front of us isn't always obvious. Until Next time, God Speed and good luck!
Okay so for the first tip here is what I would reccomend if the system boots yet does not go into a GUI interface. OS/2 has a commandline editor called tedit. With this you can edit a file such as config.sys which tells the computer what to do and what drivers and devices to load after it has succesfully turned on. The line we will be concerned with is the one that say SET PROTSHELL = ..... First type REM in front of this line and then type in the directory of the OS/2 in my case SET PROTSHELL=C:\OS2\CMD.EXE you don't have to capitalize it all but if you notice most of the file is all caps so let's stick with the normal. now press F2 which saves and then f3 to quit the tedit program. Now that you have this step done you can issue the shutdown -y command. I found this amusing to see they had a third party app just to shutdown the operating system. Once the system comes back you will be at a command line. Most of the problems I have had with OS/2 involve the disk gone south scenario so I use the ever familiar sounding chkdsk command. There is one big difference between chkdsk on OS/2. It has options after the /f:x with x being the level of chkdsk. for more information see this link I normally also include the /V for vverbose information. Be patient with this command because sometimes it takes a while to run the command and this may be a good time to grab a snack. My recover took about 1.5 hours on a tiny 4 GB drive. If I didn't say it already I now know why OS/2 is not around.
The Second Level of debug. Okay so now we know that the problem isn't in the filesystem or is it? in my case a file had become corrupted and the only way to truely find the culprit is by going through the config.sys file. The easiest way is to start first by loading the pmshell. If this comes back with a blank screen or an error then a file for your shell is corrupted and recovery is most likely going to happen by mailing it to a hard drive recovery specialist. This was the case with my restore. After receiving the recovered img file back I restored it to a newly acquired 50 pin SCSI hard drive and precedded to boot the system.
The Last level, or so we hope, of troubleshooting is to once again logically step through the boot order of the system in question. The first change I would recommend if you haven't already done it is to REM out the command you previously created in step one and un-REM out the original command. Now if you have luck you should at least get into the GUI interface but the voicemail system application won't start. At this point it is just looking through the files in question. Once word of advice I have it to use tedit to look through the lines in the cmd files that launch the applications you are having problems with. In my case the person was smart enough to write a routine that says if you have an error then just exit. This is really fun because you type the command, you see the window pop up, you see words and then it just closes. No error, no bells, no whistles. If you REM out the EXIT line it won't close the window and you can see what the command line was complaining about before the untimely close of the window and this will lead you to the source file. In my case I was missing one DLL which luckily enough I had on a CD.
Maybe Next Time I will cover restoring an IMG file. It's really easy but sometimes what is right in front of us isn't always obvious. Until Next time, God Speed and good luck!
Comments
Post a Comment