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Date:	Thu, 6 Apr 2006 12:49:51 PST8
From:	"Roderick Klein" <rwklein@mensys.nl >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	< "scoug-help@scoug.com" > scoug-help@scoug.com >
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: a couple decent installs, at last (!)

Content Type: text/plain

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006 12:42:47 PST8, J R FOX wrote:

>[long-ish post]

From time to time I have been trying to read some of your emails, but
there so long its not realy efficient to read them.
A lot of puzzle pieces, but its hard to find anything out from this big
flow of information what is going wrong ?
If you would have opened a support ticket at ecomstation.com when the
problems started. We could have invested time to trace it down.
Most likely some of your problems are related to a single problem.

>Using another
>fresh-out-of-the-box HDD, I completed a base install
>of eCS 1.2R, and another base install of the 2.0 Beta.
> (The latter did not have that difference file applied
>to the ISO, so I hope it wasn't needed.) By "base
>install" I mean: non-migration install, to a bare
>drive rather than a complex pre-partitioned
>environment,

It does not matter which drive letter you specify. Thats just a drive
letter the installer processes use.
If you networking components goto for example drive K: and your OS to
drive C: it would not matter.
The same as your OS being installed to drive K: completely.

>.Easy rather than Advanced install, and no
>further customization of the installed OS, as yet.
>These installs do have the intended partition drive
>letters, but this is *not* their ultimate
>destinations.

There is no difference in how the installer behaves if you choose to
run advanced or easy.
Other then that you get different screens. But in the background it
runs
the same install scripts.

> Rather, they are intended as baselines,
>and reuseable templates. I have now imaged the
>results with DFSEE, plus saved some key files
>separately for reference, such as Config.Sys and the
>INSTLOG.Zip.
>
>Things went fairly smoothly this time. I did not use
>PM8 or DFSEE for any partitioning, but let the
>installer do it all. No 'Partition Table is Corrupt'
>messages,

This is something that in beta 3 will be fixed with the aid
of a simple function in minilvm.

>No 2G partition with 500M worth of files
>after the install but only 44M of free space
>remaining. (And I never did account for that one.)

So if I get it correct you created a partition that big that after the
install of eCS
you have 44 MB left on the boot drive. If you did that, then that is a
recipe for disaster.
Temp files that need to be stored for your web browser, the spooler
runs from your install drive
(just to name a few items).

>The 1.2R installer did hang at the Startup.Cmd window
>in Phase 3 (GuidProc.Exe ... EIENDPH3.GPS), but I
>rebooted with C-A-D and the installation did go
>through to completion, unlike a couple other times in
>past install attempts.

Open a support ticket and ecomstation.com and we can look at the
problem (with logs).

>I did get this anomaly on the 1.2R install, as
>reported by DFSEE, which I _have_ seen before. But
>I'm hoping it relates to just one file, and may not be
>terribly consequential (?).
>
>----------------------------------------------
>Display sector table in verbose format.
> err-mask
> Used 18876 of 844678 at 0 show:
>Errors matching: FFFFFFFF
> SectorNr Reference LSN info Size of area
>Containing
> ======== ================== =================
>==========
> 00000011 Ref: none 000001 = 0.5 KiB :
>HPFS spareblock 00000100
> - Incorrect checksum value
> 000572F3 Ref: 001F69E0 000001 = 0.5 KiB :
>File Fnode 00000020
> LSN info: f 100% 572F4 1.0 KiB
>\OS2\SYSTEM\RAS\ERRSAV.DAT
> - Filesize in Fnode smaller than in
>dir-entry
>
>Total errors/warnings detected: 2
>------------------------------------------------

To much speculation on my side without proper information. It seems
your hard disk may have I/O errors ?!
Sometimes (sometimes!!) combinations of hard disks en CD ROM players
can cause strange conflics.
Not properly grounded equipment. Timing issue's on the IDE bus..
IDE equipment is supposed to meet certain standards, but there
are standards on paper and
Read the \ecs\DOC\DANIS506\danis506.doc on your hdd for some
interesting reading.
Install eCS with the Daniela driver in compability mode.

>Now, some observations:
>
>Tony may or may not be right about the Cold Boot ==>
>Install thing, but it costs you nothing to do this.
>Couldn't hurt.
>
>Ray is probably right that the fragile eCS installer
>is least likely to slip on a banana peel if it
>installs to a fresh drive with nothing else on it.

Again I get more the impression of I/O errors and not the installer
slipping over a banana peel.

>This certainly seems to avoid the hang at the JFS.IFS
>line. I think the AUTOCHK * barfs if you have NTFS
>(or maybe some other types of) partitions on the
>drive. And what can happen with the installer AFTER
>THAT isn't pretty.
>
>I'm kinda skeptical re the comment I think Steven made
>at the last meeting, which seemed to suggest that a
>bare drive right out of the box has some nasty MS code
>already on it that we aren't taking into account.
>Still, just in case, I did a NEWMBR on the drive
>before starting.
>
>Don't know if they did anything to it in the interim,
>but the installer seemed to work more surely in the
>2.0 Beta. That was my impression, anyway.
>Eliminating one of the install phases looks like a
>good move.

The installer scripts between 1.2R and 2.0 have almost not been
modified.
Phase 3 BTW is not that complex. It primarly builds the wizard you see
on the next boot
and switches things on like the startup folder, the starting of
setup.cmd etc and other things to wrap
up the install.

>2.0b is said to be missing some things that were in
>1.2R. In 1.1 or 1.2GA, I have to jiggle a memory
>stick around in the slot and hit "Refresh Removeable
>Media" *twice* before the flash drive gets picked up
>and the drive letter assigned. This is *not* a H/W
>thing: W2K has no such issue. There is some new item
>in 1.2R that picks up the memory stick right away,
>showing an alert box, more in the manner of the Dark
>Side (although it still requires some jiggling in the
>USB slot before the light goes ON). But this USB
>enhancement does not seem to be present in 2.0b.

That is correct and a new beta is in the pipeline which has a synched
file tree.

>Steven, I think you are incorrect in saying that the
>Dark Side installer can't cope too well with multiple
>existing partitions / OSes on the HDD *either*. I
>have done that a few times, successfully, though not
>with a partition enviroment that is quite as complex
>as what is now on the Shuttle HDD.
>
>Next up: Migration installs vs. the UniMaint Portable
>Backup that either does or doesn't work (we shall
>see). Whatever turns out best, my goal is to drop it
>into place on the production HDD.

Migration works as well as it will work. Most likely the unimaint works
better.
Our migration is targetted and migrating your old desktop. Compared to
IBM's migration system
our system has become superior. One of the things the IBM never does is
is to check if WP_DESKTOP is present.
If its missing your desktop is not migrated. Besides this, our
installer cleans up things that can cause problems when the new desktop
is build.

Roderick Klein

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