ADSM-L

FW: OS/2 not fully recovered... any clues ?

1995-11-01 16:51:00
Subject: FW: OS/2 not fully recovered... any clues ?
From: "PITTSON, TIMOTHY" <PITTSON1 AT BWMAIL1.HCC DOT COM>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 16:51:00 EST
I don't think you can change drive letters because OS/2 contains some
pointers in  .INI files that are hard coded to drive letters.  After you
restore an OS/2 drive, you need to run SYSINSTX against the drive just
restored.  You might also want to check your exclude list in the DSM.OPT
file to make sure you're not excluding anything you need.

Tim Pittson
pittson1 AT bwmail1.hcc DOT com
 ----------
From: owner-adsm-l
To: Multiple recipients of list ADSM-L
Subject: OS/2 not fully recovered... any clues ?
Date: Wednesday, November 01, 1995 4:07PM

I have a nasty habit recently of having to format my hard drive & re-install
my OS/2 Warp system from scratch and I would like to get out of that habit.
With a recent re-build of my pc I thought I had solved all my problems.

A few weeks ago I got things so horribly screwed up that I needed to restore
my full disk, so I counted on ADSM to do this for me. Luckily, ADSM was one
of the few things that was still functional. The restore ran but no luck...
apparently some of the key pointers & files weren't recovered properly, so
it was rebuild time.

I then cleverly used BootManager to install dual partitions. I now have 2
complete Warp systems, one on D: and one on E:. The one on D: is my main
drive that I use daily, while the one on E: is simply an emergency partition
that I can boot when I screw up the other one as I'm prone to do. My
thinking
was that in the scenario before, it is difficult for ADSM to backup &
restore
a disk from a 'live' system, because some of the files could be open and/or
various pointers & things may be changing. Thus my thinking was that if I
booted from the E: partition & took a 'snapshot' of the D: system while it
was completely idle, this should be sufficient for disaster recovery. I did
this via an ARCHIVE of the disk rather than a backup. I was of course hoping
I would never need to test my idea.

Guess what ? I had to test my idea. Once again poor drive D: became a mess
but this time I wasn't worried, I thought I would just format it & restore
the archive while booted on the E: system. Clever idea, and it did seem to
work for the most part. After it completed & I booted from D: things were
looking real good as it came up... until it came time to display the
desktop. Guess what ? No desktop !! OS/2 is fairly difficult to use
when it boots up to a completely blank screen. No desktop, no command
windows, no nothing. Even the recovery attempt to boot using the
maintenance desktop failed. When I booted from E: again & checked the
D: disk it was easy to see why... there were no subdirectories in the
desktop !

(I had nothing excluded in my options file except swapper.dat)

Is there a trick to getting a full recovery of an OS/2 system using
ADSM ? What am I missing here ? Does a subdirectory not get restored
if there were no files in it ? What magic is needed to ensure that all
system files are properly backed up & restorable ?

Thanks to anyone who can provide some clues ! (although I hopefully
won't need to test this again very soon... I could rebuild this stupid
thing in my sleep by now !)

Byron Graham
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