The worst installation program EVER

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inflater
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The worst installation program EVER

Post by inflater »

Hi,
I have two LBA-enabled hard disks on my testbed, a 9,5 GB one, where resides MS-DOS at 200 MB partition, Windows 95, Windows 98 etc., and a empty 4GB hard disk, also LBA-enabled. Both HDDs are with UDMA 2. I've created to the second hard disk a 900 MB FAT partition for the upcoming installation of OS/2...

So, just were installing OS/2 Warp 4 to my testbed. First, OS/2 FDISK could not work with partitions (except deleting) on my second 4GB hard disk, it said "the partition table could be corrupted", even that I was using LBA all the time. One hour killed by tweaking, next I've downloaded two patches to the install disks. Now it seems to be alright, altough for a strange reason I could set the second HDD's FAT partition "startable", but not "installable". Two hours killed again by searching on the internet. So I downloaded the OS/2 CD version and all the patches [three hours killed btw], because I didn't have like 40 "1,8MB" diskettes available. But hey - 1st disk's 1st partition seems to be "installable", but 2nd disk's 1st partition (I tried to resize it to 200 MB FAT16) didn't. Weird :shock:. So I migrated MS-DOS off to the first partition to the 4GB disk (the 900MB partition), but hey - this CD release of OS/2 needs "at least" 175 MB (comparing to the original MS-DOS first disk partition = 200 MB)... Gah!

So I deleted the shared WinNT pagefile to free the space on the MS-DOS 2nd disk's partition (NTLDR is there), resized the partition to be able to move MS-DOS back to the 1st partition and leaved the now-former 900MB DOS partition to OS/2. 30 minutes killed. Coudln't set the 2nd disk's partition "installable" again!
So I disabled detection of primary master disk (where ms-dos and all things reside) and OS/2 *did* detect the HDD :shock:, so I got really mad and physically unplugged the primary master disk and now the 900MB partition of the 4GB disk seems to be installable. Hooray!... :roll:

After this installing and such, I've plugged back again the primary master disk and added a new boot option - OS/2 from second hard disk.
(I'm using opensource bootloader GAG with chainloaded NTLDR - NTLDR for loading DOS and Windows NT kernels. They exist both in the primary master disk [the first disk, the 9,5GB one], NTLDR is on the MS-DOS partition).

So, the worst installation program (for a OS) is for me the OS/2 one. Even Win98 install program wasn't so "hyperactive"... :roll: -> But to say the truth, OS/2 looks nice and it's stable.

Do you have met with similar weird installation programs (OS or software) too?

Regards
inflater
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Post by JackScott »

Funny you should mention that. I have a story about a little program that couldn't. It's name was "Office". Would you like to hear it? Yes? Okay then.

This morning, actually, I decided to upgrade my Dad's computer from XP to 2007, simply because I had a spare copy of 2007 lying around. I uninstalled XP, which was fine. I installed 2007, which was fine. I went to run Word 2007, and it did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I restarted the computer. Still, clicking on the icon did nothing. Not even a hard drive flash. No error message. Nothing. Unimpressed, I uninstalled it and went back to XP. And that's when the trouble started.

I installed XP and went to run it, and it complained "Not installed for the current user." I went on the Internet; Microsoft has a KB article for this. Needless to say, it doesn't work. Neither do any of the other 'fixes' that are on the Internet. I try everything, reinstalling the software about 4 times. Each time, it was further away from working.

Finally, I tried installing 2007 again. Still no luck, it refused to do anything (and the Internet, wise as it may be, did not find anything). At this point I had spent 3 hours working on the problem, and my Mum wanted to use a word processor. So I downloaded OpenOffice 2.3.1 from a network share (my computer, where I installed Office 2007) and installed it. Worked fine.

What annoys me is; my job basically consists of installing:
a) Wireless networks
b) Office 2007
So I should be able to do it. I can do it. But I've never seen anything like these two problems. Final word: Annoying.
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Post by 01000101 »

I try to cut-down physical harddrive allocation and put virtual harddrives in its place.
right now in VPC I have OSX Leopard and OS/2 Warp w/ tcp/ip on my virtual partitions, makes things alot easier.

as for the office thing, I had a similar issue but it was with upgrading Nero.
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