home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc
- Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ames!news.hawaii.edu!uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu!craig
- From: craig@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Craig Oshiro)
- Subject: Re: What OS/2 needs
- Message-ID: <1992Jul25.221256.4096@news.Hawaii.Edu>
- Sender: root@news.Hawaii.Edu (News Service)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu
- Organization: University of Hawaii
- References: <1992Jul23.201051.1525346@zeus.calpoly.edu>
- Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 22:12:56 GMT
- Lines: 56
-
- In article <1992Jul23.201051.1525346@zeus.calpoly.edu> jemenake@zeus.calpoly.edu (Joe Emenaker) writes:
- >Well, after recently having OS/2 crash and refuse to boot... claiming it
- >was missing a DLL it needed, I'd say that OS/2 needs a utility that lets
- >you re-load some of the necessary files from the distribution disks. In
- >fact, going a step further, they could have the file look at some sort of
- >error-log and figure out for itself what files needed to be reloaded.
-
- I must agree here after having OS/2 recently crash and burn on me. One
- day I found just a black screen and couldn't even C-A-D so I hit the reset
- button. Just the usual POST stuff but after that, no disk activity.
- Rebooting from a floppy showed at least my HPFS partition was ok but
- I noticed OS2LDR.MSG was missing. I also noticed that of most of the
- 15 megs I had free was used so I suspected the swapper file was the
- culprit. I tried changing into the OS2 subdirectory but was given a
- "Unable to access device on OS2" message. The entire OS2 subdirectory
- and its contents were unreadable. As a side note, at the time this
- occurred, I had most of the latest patches installed and running for
- the previous 2 weeks without any problems. The only session running
- at the time was my bulletin board program.
-
- I proceeded to run CHKDSK /F and it promptly started marking flags as
- corrupted and immediately started deleted those files. Fortunately, this
- was able to recover the damaged directories but many OS/2 system files
- were removed by CHKDSK for being corrupted. It would have helped if
- this chkdsk information was written to an error log since even though
- chkdsk fixed the HPFS errors. I still couldn't boot due to the missing DLL's
- and other system files. I did manage to replace what files were missing
- w/o reinstalling but couldn't boot to the WorkPlace Shell. No matter
- what I tried, it didn't want to come up. I shut off the system and left
- it for another day. Oddly enough, it booted up fine the next day but
- the desktop fonts were messed up since a font file had been lost (I
- reinstalled it but even today, can't use Helv 8). The OS/2 System Editor
- also had a blank icon and refused to run. Unpacking it from the floppy
- doesn't fix the problem for some reason (it still shows up with a blank
- icon and refused to launch).
-
- Also after this crash, programs that ran fine before now have problems
- (they either refuse to run or lock up the window). Several DOS apps
- now result in either an illegal opcode error (invalid 386 opcode or
- something to that effect) and the command.com problem:
-
- SYS3015: An attempt to load COMMAND.COM failed.
- SYS3016: This session was halted because COMMAND.COM cannot be loaded.
-
- It then gives the option to R)eboot or F)lush the application. And these
- DOS programs worked fine before the crash.
-
- Anyway, after experiencing the above, I also believe a better recovery
- method is needed when restoring system integrity. Chkdsk shouldn't
- delete files it thinks are corrupted but should move them to another
- area for inspection. It should also log the errors so it makes it
- easier to recover those files lost. Its been 2 weeks since the crash
- occurred and I'm still getting everything back into working order.
- A reinstall may be in order but given the problems I had the first
- time around with the trapping, I want to avoid that as much as
- possible.
-