Warp Factor 3, engage!

About a week ago one of our volunteers dropped off a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 3000CD all-in-one computer. The Pack-Mate 3000CD has a Pentium 75MHz CPU, a base RAM of 8MB (chips soldered on to the motherboard) expandable up to 72MB, and a 540MB hard drive. Even for a refurbisher like us this is a truly old system. It sat unused and untested for most of the week until I got the crazy idea to install OS/2 Warp 3 on it.

The OS/2 Warp boot screen on our Packard Bell Pack-Mate 3000CD

The Pack-Mate 3000CD was designed to run Windows 95, but we work with Windows almost every day and most of our volunteers have lots of experience with different versions of Windows. It was time to show something a little different and OS/2 Warp 3 fit the bill.



Before I even got to the install I needed to take care of a 'invalid configuration' BIOS error that kept appearing when the machine was turned on. At first I suspected it might be a memory error. Dell machines tend to complain when new memory is added, and this machine only had 2 sticks of RAM in the four slots on the machine. My suspicion was that the extra RAM may not be the appropriate 72pin RAM for the system. I decided to look up the system specs to see what RAM the system would take (EDO, non-parity, parity). Unfortunately most of the Google results had nothing to do with the system we had, so I decided to just load the BIOS defaults. Loading the BIOS defaults made the invalid configuration go away. The size of the RAM chips had nothing to do with the BIOS error. I just needed to reload the default settings.

The problems with the system didn't end there, I also noticed that the CD-ROM was set to primary master and the hard drive to secondary master. The drives wouldn't make a difference in the BIOS, but I switched them around because it's a good build practice anyway.

OS/2 Warp 3 starts to install on the Pack-Mate 3000CD.

Finally on to the OS/2 installation, or so I thought... We have the blue-spine boxed floppy edition of OS/2 Warp 3.0. The installation disk and disk 1 booted fine to the Easy/Advanced install screen, but OS/2 refused to install. It didn't take me long to remember that back when I used OS/2 hard drives were not particularly large. As I suspected the 540MB hard drive was too big for the Easy Install setting to install over existing data, the drive needed to be partitioned correctly first. My OS/2 experience started at Comdex Toronto, which if I remember correctly was August of 1995 (before Windows 95 was available to the general public). Without going into a long explanation of my experience I'll just say it was an much more positive experience working with IBM's Team OS/2 than it was with Microsoft. (I don't dislike Microsoft, but my experience with Microsoft at Comdex 95 was very unpleasant). Anyway my machine specs were much less than this machine (486DX2/66, 214MB Hard Drive, 16MB RAM). It turns out OS/2 Warp 3.0 needs a partition smaller than 528MB to install to. After installing the boot manager and dividing up the  hard drive the OS/2 Easy Install worked like a charm.

But the story doesn't end here... the install went beautifully until disk #11 spat out CRC (cyclical redundancy check) errors. I retried hoping the disk would get past the error, but no luck, stopped only 4 disks away from the end. This was our only copy of OS/2 Warp leaving us a bit in the lurch.

One of the other staff here suggested using a disk regeneration tool, but I was a bit leery since the disks have OS/2 extended attributes. Then I got the great idea just to open the metal sleeve and gently blow on the disk. Sure enough, dust was preventing the disk from progressing. After installing the rest of the disks and print drivers we had an OS/2 machine.

One of our volunteers checks out OS/2

There's still a few things we have to work out on the machine, audio is not working correctly and video is set to 640x480 x 16 colours, but there are video driver disks and many updates to be installed. A project for another day.