dear sirs. i own an 4.3 GB ide wdv34300 hard drive with four operating systems on it: win95, nt, linux and os/2. after having switched the recognition mode in the bios from LBA/on to LBA/off, os/2 was quickly done. but the bootmanager refused consistently all my attempts to install it. "the disk may be damaged or corrupted" it says. pressing enter shows a pulldown menu with all entries disabled (blue) except the "delete partition" one. which details must be adjusted? thanks in advance sedat

First off, make sure you have the latest ide drivers. get them here: http://service.boulder.ibm.com/os2ddpak/html/647679D565C73E0F862565980068EFB0.html

I have the same hard drive. And have experienced the same error. I kind of "tricked" my way around it. OS/2 install is "stupid". All you have to do is use FDISK (the good linux fdisk not dos) and make a 1MB OS/2 Bootmanager partition, and of course a partition for OS/2 (FAT or HPFS, HPFS only if you another FAT based OS), when you start the OS/2 install, don't do the easy install. You will get a few errors, telling you your disk may be corrupt, WITHOUT CHANGING ANYTHING, exit OS/2 FDISK, it will tell you, that you cannot install OS/2 - its lying, just say OK, and the next thing it will ask is if you want to format the partition - -say yes, it will pick the 1st FAT/HPFS partition it sees. Using this method means, of course, that your other OS's will have to be installed FIRST. Just remember to keep OS/2 win95 under the 1024 cylinder (under the 2GB mark). You must completely ignore OS/2's FDISK warnings, ... use other -newer- tools for partitioning. BTY. LILO can boot all of these too.

I got a thinkpad with Win98 on it, and I noticed that I couldn't install BM or add partitions until the Win98 fat32 partition was deleted. Until I did that the fdisk refused to work right and said the disk was corrupted. I could not delete it from os/2 fdisk but had to boot win98 and use win98 fdisk from the Run box. Mark

I got a thinkpad with Win98 on it, and I noticed that I couldn't install BM or add partitions until the Win98 fat32 partition was deleted. Until I did that the fdisk refused to work right and said the disk was corrupted. I could not delete it from os/2 fdisk but had to boot win98 and use win98 fdisk from the Run box. Mark