Building and Configuring

The new machine is to be called Columbia, after the character from The Rocky Horror Show.

Basically all the procured components were simply bolted together and the power button pressed ... No Life. Re-reading the Motherboard guide it became clear upon rechecking the connection of the various LEDs and switches that:

  1. LEDs were connected in reverse, no harm done. Simply reverse the connector to correct.
  2. Power button not connected to appropriate jumpers. The consequence is that there is absolutely no life in the system, no power supply fan, no CPU fan or board activity. The first, and wrong, thought was a broken PSU, but for ATX motherboards none connection of the soft power button means no activity.
Correcting these issues and Columbia sprang into life, except there was no operating system installed on the hard disc.

Disc Partitioning

Having bought a 10 GB hard drive, in what way was is to be configured? The following was decided upon:

Operating System Installation

Since a large IDE hard disc drive was being used, the updated IDE hard disc drivers had already been acquired to enable OS/2 Warp 4 to operate with disc greater than 8.4 GB. A Boot Diskette 1 had been made which contained the updated driver, leaving the original Boot Diskette 1 intact. On successfully bootstrapping the PC a customised install of the operating system occurred. The principal differences to the install were not including the enhanced editor, EPM, and not including JAVA. Another distribution of EPM v6 was available with more macros and toys. Similarly for JAVA a more up-to-date distribution was available. Strangely, the installation process did install JAVA and set up the parameters in the config.sys file.

Hardware Drivers

There were three specific pieces of hardware for which drivers would be required for the system. These pieces of hardware were: The Logitech Pilot Mouse has a scroll wheel but unfortunately they do not provide a device driver for OS/2. It was believed that the IBM SCROLLMS driver would work with this mouse and so this driver was acquired from IBM's Device Driver site. This driver was installed and yes the scroll button does now function under OS/2, both within a PM session and WIN-OS2 sessions. The latter was not expected.

The Matrox G400 Video card was supplied with a CDROM which did contain the necessary files to drive the card. These were installed with no problems. A display resolution of 1024 x 768 x 16777216 (16 M of colours) was installed at a refresh rate of 60 Hz. To my eyes the display is solid with no flicker, others may comment on the low refresh rate. Note, there have been reports in newsgroups that the Matrox drivers cause the display to freeze when using the IBM VisualAge C++ (VAC++) compiler v4.0. A possible solution is to use the Scitech drives instead.

The Iomega Zip drive was not supplied with drivers for OS/2. However, drivers and utilities (OS2V234.zip) had previously been downloaded from Iomega to support the Zip drive. The Zip drive was configured using the Open Architecture Driver (OAD).

Issues

The following issues still remain to be attended on Columbia.

Problems

Despite now having OS/2 Warp up and running the following problems needed to be resolved:
  1. Shutdown, either from WarpCenter or from RMB does not work. It is is necessary to use C-A-D in order to shut the system down, switching off when the system starts to come back up again. Not ideal.

    2. It was necessary to reinstall Warp 4 before I had finished setting up my system, trying to resolve the memory problem broke the OS and a complete reinstall was required. When the system came up this time the Shutdown functionality was operating. Why? This is left an exercise for the reader.
     
  2. Inability to see memory above 64 MB, despite using the DANIS506.ADD driver from hobbes.

    3. A quick posting to the newsgroup comp.os.os2.setup.misc suggested that the BIOS may be using the interrupts in a way Warp was not expecting. A patch for the OS loader was suggested, patchldr.zip also acquired from hobbes. Duly installing this patch all the system memory was now reported as being visible to the operating system.

    Patchldr.zip is also produced by Daniela Engert.

Thank You

In configuring my system I would like to acknowledge the information and assistance offered via the OS/2 newsgroups when selecting the components for my PC and in resolving queries when all did not go according to plan.

... and Finally

It can be recommended to build and configure your own OS/2 based PC because: Building and configuring is not without some drawbacks: Have an an enjoyable learning experience and build/re-build/upgrade your own PC to an improved specification.

Take me home!

All comments and suggestions to John S Glover

Last modified 30 June 2000.