Re: Bad sectors on boot drive

In article <274b1$48474222$26010@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Will Honea <whonea@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Two notes of interest: xcopy will NOT get all the stuff you need moved
over - you need the OS/2 equivalent of the DOS "SYS" command, which I don't
have tight on the tip of my tongue, in order to get the appropriate boot
record fragment. Comes on the install CDROM or floppy so that is a minor
nuisance.

There is no problem if you do it right.

I seem to recall the DOS XCOPY had a restriction where it would not copy
system boot files. The OS/2 XCOPY does not have this restriction, even
though early versions of the documentation said it did.

The trick to easy imaging / copying of a bootable OS/2 disk is to boot to a
command prompt from the "boot blob". Press Alt-F1 when the white square and
"OS/2" (or "eCS" on an eCS system) appears at the top left of the screen
just as it starts to boot, then select the "command prompt" option.
You can then run BACKUP, XCOPY, ZIP, or whatever from there. When booted in
this way, the only files that are locked and uncopyable are SWAPPER.DAT and
one of the LAN log files (and that one is only if you're running LAN Server
or client). Both files will be recreated on next boot if not present, and you
really don't want to waste space and time copying SWAPPER.DAT anyway.

Also, the only time you need the SYSINSTX command is if you're copying from
a FAT formatted boot partition to another FAT formatted boot partition.
HPFS (and, as far as I know, JFS) does not require SYSINSTX. FAT uses
different boot sectors for bootable versus non-bootable partitions, but HPFS
uses the same code for both.

--
Don Hills (dmhills at attglobaldotnet) Wellington, New Zealand
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
-- Advertisement on the box for Microsoft Windows 2.11 for 286
.

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