From: craig@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Craig Oshiro)
Subject: Re: What OS/2 needs
Organization: University of Hawaii
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 22:12:56 GMT

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.