Best, simple OS/2 Warp install for a 486 thinkpad?

[solidpro]

Hi Everyone

I've got some older machines - the Thinkpad 340 and 370C, for example which I'm going to sell, but to make them more interesting, I'd like to format the HDDs and put something more interesting than Windows on them. Can anyone recommend an easily sourced, FDD version of OS/2 Warp which will generally 'just work' on this type of thinkpad? I've plenty of decent floppy disks and the means to restore images to them, but I'm way out of practice with OS/2 warp to know what would be the best one for machines such as these...

In theory, I might be able to get a PCMCIA style CD-ROM drive working on some of them without too much bother and do OS/2 Warp 4, but I'm not sure if this was too 'new' for this era of machine.

Finally, how easy is it to dual boot OS/2 warp with Windows 3.11 or 95? Which OS would you install first?

Thanks

Alex

[ThinkDan]

Warp 3 would have been current, Warp 4 an upgrade. The latter will have more capable IDE drivers out of the box, without faffing. A dual setup of Win95 and OS/2 Warp might be good for retro giggles.

To save a whole world of floppy-swappy pain working out the correct config and sequence at 486 speed, test your planned install in VirtualBox. Far faster! I've been working on this recently for a Warp 4 / NT 4 Boot Manager combo.

Any Warp 3 or 4 CD will have the floppy images on it, but you'll need a DOS tool called LOADDSKF.EXE (should be there too) to write them onto floppies as they're high-density XDF formatted. Many needed for a full install of Warp 4 with networking, and video and printer driver disks but not strictly all at the same time. Instructions for making disks here (v2.1 but same principle), some background on my 'PC110 OS/2 install from floppies' pages here and here.

You'll need decent RAM on the 340/370 - ignore the stated minimum for Warp 3, at least 16MB, 32MB would be better - or they'll just be paging all the time and nasty to use. Use this old device driver matrix to determine what drivers are needed, but obviously the links are dead - just google for the files by name or find them at a PCCBBS mirror.

Some useful info on planning here. There is an image of the 755CD with a dual-boot DOS/Win3.1/OS/2 Warp knocking about on archive.org, I was looking at it recently and it reminded me of what a cludge dual boot was - all the DOS, Windows, and OS/2 files in the same FAT partition, easy for a numpty 'tidying up' to cripple one side or the other of the dual boot.

Using OS/2's Boot Manager and separate partitions was a much better solution. Since DOS (and, by extension, Win 3.1/95) is oblivious to OS/2 (particularly with HPFS), I'd partition with a 1MB primary for Boot Manager, install DOS (and Windows) into a second primary partition, and create a third primary partition to subsequently install OS/2 into. From memory a Win95 install recognises OS/2 if already present but works around it reasonably gracefully, all you have to do is FDISK and set the Boot Manager partition as bootable again, then add the Win95 DOS partition into the Boot Manager menu.

PCMCIA CDROM support may be OK, particularly if it's something fairly mainstream and then-current like a Panasonic card and 2x / 4x drive combo as there were many drivers included on the boot diskettes, but you may be venturing into adding OS/2 drivers (and corresponding CONFIG.SYS statements) onto the boot floppies. Copying the install images from CD to a spare ~200MB FAT partition/drive is even easier - make sure you copy across the OS2IMAGE directory structure, plus the OS2SE20.SRC file from CD root to HDD partition root - it marks the disk as an OS/2 installation medium and specifies the path to the install files. Amend CONFIG.SYS on a copy of diskette 1 as here and away you go... I've just done this in VirtualBox to prove the instructions linked are still good.

[nfraser01]

Warp 3 would have been current, Warp 4 an upgrade. The latter will have more capable IDE drivers out of the box, without faffing. A dual setup of Win95 and OS/2 Warp might be good for retro giggles.

Intersesting thread!