Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc
Subject: HELP! It's going from bad to worse! Fast!
From: jemenake@zeus.calpoly.edu (Joe Emenaker)
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 09:01:09 GMT
Organization: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Okay.. first off. I commend IBM for getting my copy out the door so fast. I
ordered the thing Last Wednesday and it was on the doorstep by Saturday.
:-)    

Now, I've been hearing about this "black icon" thing. Well, after I
installed OS/2 on a 386-40/8MB/130MB/AMI/Trident machine, I'd sometimes get
some wierd behavior when trying to run a WIN-OS2 app. I'd double-click on
the icon and the drive would go on for a sec and then PULSE would go to
100% and stay there while the icon stayed greyed and the program never
opened. I'd bring up the menu for the icon but "CLOSE" wasn't one of the
options. The only way I've found to un-grey it is to copy it, and delete
the original (which would un-grey all of the other icons in the folder that
I was having the same problem with). Anyway, my question is: Is this the
imfamous "black icon" bug? If so, it's wrongly named. It should be the
"greyed icon" bug... or at least the "blackED icon" bug. When I read "black
icon" I figured that OS/2 was misreading the icon data and just put a big
black square there instead. This causes me to be in doubt as to whether or
not my problem is old news or new news.

Anyway... off to the REAL fun:

I was trying to install SimCity from a DOS window. I ran INSTALL and it
*HUNG* OS/2 completely. No Ctrl-Esc, no Ctrl-Alt-Del, no Num-Lock response,
no nothing. So, I reset the machine and just tried to run SIMCITY.EXE in
the DOS window and I got this friendly little message about how there was
some sort of catastrophic meltdown and that I should write down all of the
info on the screen and report it to my service rep.

So, I reset the machine AGAIN. Now, the little OS/2 logo came up and then,
the screen cleared for a second or two.. and then I get a text message that
says that OS/2 cannot load "THE" dynamic link library (yeah, right... like
there's only ONE!) that it needs to start up. It tells me to put it either
in the root directory or somewhere in the LIBPATH. Well, I'm a big boy. I
can do that. Only... OS/2 forgot to tell me WHICH one! Furthermore, I've
done directories of all of the install disks and recorded all of the files
matching *.DLL from them. I found that there were some DLLs in the \OS2\DLL
directory that didn't appear on the install disks. So SOME of these things
were created or compiled at install time. Plus, I wasn't sure if they
needed to be uncompressed like Microshaft stuff does. Well, I guess I
should have known when I saw the pamphle... er.... manuals that IBM was
shooting for brevity as far as technical help that the user can access at
their leisure. Too bad. Probably would have saved them lots of phone
support time. Anyway... does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this
problem?

Anyway, I finally gave up and decided to re-install. Well, I boot the
Installation disk and it asks for Disk 1 and I feed that to the machine.
Then, it querries me about if I want to format the partition, etc. Then, it
asks for Disk 2 and I feed it in. Then it says it's installing the files
and then it halts and says that it had trouble with some of the files. I
hit Enter to see the INSTALL.LOG (or whatever it's named) and I see that it
created the directories okay but it biffed when it tried to copy UNPACK.EXE
to the hard disk. Mind you, this disk-set (5.25") installed perfectly two
days ago. Just to double-check, I booted from DOS and tried copying
UNPACK.EXE by hand and it worked perfectly. Anybody have any ideas what
might be the problem here?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Joe Emenaker - Sexual Engineer | Our infernal mailer daemon has been quite
   jemenake@nike.calpoly.edu   | insitent that  my signature be limited to just
CalPoly, San Luis Obispo, Ca.  | 4 lines. However, as you can see, I have
 (This is the .sig of the day) | figured out an elegant way to put as many as
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc