From: anzick@watson.ibm.com (Bill Anzick)
Subject: Installation/Configuration problems with Oct Beta
Summary: Major and Minor problems with NT Oct Beta install
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 1993 19:48:54 GMT
News-Software: IBM OS/2 PM RN (NR/2) v0.16 by O. Vishnepolsky and R. Rogers
Reply-To: anzick@watson.ibm.com
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

I have been experimenting with the installation/configuration of NT to get familiar
with it and have found lots of minor problems but also some major/disasterous ones
also.  Here are some that I can recall:

1. The standalone install program booted from diskette appears to have a very
   serious bug dealing with partitions.  I attempted an install on a fixed disk
   which had 2 primary partitions and two logical partitions.  The first primary
   partition had OS/2 1.3 on it and was 40 cyls in size.  The second was 80 cyls
   in size and was the active C partition.  The logical partitions were OS/2 HPFS
   partitions.  When the installation program displayed the partitions and asked me
   where I wanted to place NT, I indicated the 80 Cyl C drive.  It then told me that
   there was not enough space on it, so I said to format it.  When it formated it and
   started to load the system, it got an error and gave up.  When I restarted the install,
   it told me the 80 cyl partition had 0 space left on it.  I booted DOS and checked the
   80 Cyl partition, and nothing was on it.  I found that the 40 Cyl inactive partition
   had been reformated, destroying the OS/2 system on it, and the NT files were placed on
   it!!

2. I had another system which had a C primary partition, 50 cyls of freespace, and a D and
   E logical partition.  I installed NT on the E partition.  I then used the NT disk manager
   to create a new partition using the 50 cyls of freespace.  After I re-booted NT, it would
   not boot because the boot loader said it could not find the \winnt subdirectory.  It turns
   out that the BOOT.INI file on the C drive tells the loader which physical partition contains
   the winnt subdirectory, and the NT disk manager fails to update this file.  Since the C
   partition was formated FAT, I could boot DOS and edit the BOOT.INI and change the partition
   number and get NT to boot.

3. I have a PS/2 M80 A31 with and IBM internal SCSI adapter and IBM (Toshiba) CD-ROM which
   I cannot get NT to read properly.  The standalone NT installation program has no problems
   reading it, and OS/2 has no problems reading it, but if I install NT using the local CD-ROM,
   when it gets to the point where it boots NT and starts copying the rest of the installation
   files from the CD-ROM, the Oct BETA just HANGS part way through the copy.  The July BETA
   does not hang, but displays an I/O error popup window indicating non-fatal read errors on
   the CD-ROM.

4. When I remote install NT on the PS/2 M80 A31, everything installs fine.  However, when
   I attempt to run certain programs, I get an application error.  A typical example is
   executing WRITE against an WRI file, I get "The instruction at 0x60615974 referenced
   memory at 0x00000000.  The memory could not be written"  The application error comes
   from ntvdm.exe.  When I select "CANCEL", it shows that the instruction is a POP ESI,
   I have tried all different memory sizes and configurations to no avail.

5. The remote installation creates an emergency backup diskette, but I have not found out
   how to ever use it.  If I attempt to boot the standalone diskette, it insists that I
   need a local CD-ROM.

   Bill Anzick