Installing OS/2 Warp on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490CDT

For the sake of the nostalgia or an interesting learning experience, have fun installing OS/2 Warp 4 on your laptop. It seems to work quite well on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490CDT. If you have any questions regarding this guide, just use the contact form on this website.

Partitioning Pre-installation Video Sound Miscellaneous Attachments

Partitioning

I installed OS/2 Warp 4 using the three diskettes to get the installation started from the installation cd. Before starting the installation I turned my Unix partitions into several FAT16 partitions (due to the 2GB size limit) using fdisk from a DOS boot diskette, so the Warp installer would be able to read them. I also erased the MBR using fdisk /mbr. From within the Warp installer I was then able to create two partitions. One primary, 500 MB partition for the OS and a logical (within extended) partition to be used for data storage. Warp only uses about 150 megabytes after a default installation, by the way. I chose HPFS (which was apparently also developed by Microsoft when it was still holding hands with IBM) to be used as the file system type for both of the partitions. After creating these partitions the installer required me to restart the computer and the installation process.
Back to contents

Pre-installation

After the installation, the loading of the Sound Blaster Pro device driver which was selected by default wasn't loaded and an error was displayed. If you run into this you can just remove a line from the config.sys file, but you should just select the following devices during installation:

• Video: "Video Graphics Array (VGA)"
• Multimedia Device Support: "None" (This is the sound card)

I also selected no network adapter since I had none. APM support is switched on in the next screen, this is a good thing since it actually works for battery monitoring. After installing OS/2 you can install the proper drivers.
Back to contents

Video

To install the S3 ViRGE video card you can get a proper driver from the Toshiba website (go to the download section and select "archive models". As the readme file instructs, you need to extract the download to a FAT formatted diskette and label it "S3 DRV1". For your convenience I have added a floppy image at the bottom of this page.

Once the OS/2 system has the diskette with the driver loaded, click on the icon OS/2 System, click Command Prompts and click OS/2 Window. You can also use the drop down menu in the default tray (the bar at the top of the screen). Type a: and press enter to change your directory to the diskette drive and execute setup.

The setup will install the video driver for you, after which you can reboot and select the screen resolution and reboot once more. Click on the icon OS/2 System again, then System Setup, followed by the System icon, then select the first tab Screen. Anything sized 1024x768 will result in a virtual desktop in which you have to scroll to see another part of the desktop. 800x600x16777216 colours will work, but I had to select 65536 colours to have my 24-bit background JPEG image displayed properly.
Back to contents

Sound

Before trying to install a sound card driver, check your BIOS settings (on system start press ESC and then F1). On the second page of the BIOS settings set the sound card settings like they look in the picture, then after the installation of the driver, try to keep to these settings again when configuring the software.

On the same page where the video driver is available, an OS/2 Yamaha OPL3-SAx sound driver can be downloaded for this laptop. Once again, the contents of the file need to be extracted to a FAT formatted diskette (you can use the diskette image at the bottom of this page). After inserting the disk, click the OS/2 System icon again, then click the Command Prompts icon and finally the OS/2 Window icon. Change the drive letter to A again by typing a: and pressing enter. This time enter the command minstall. In the window that appears, select Yamaha OPL3-SA Series Audio Adapter. Configure the driver and click install and answer yes to have the program alter the config.sys file.
Back to contents

Miscellaneous

• If you only happened to have a diskette drive to transfer files (and don't want to waste a cd), you might want to compress some files with zip. To unzip them again on OS/2, you will need an unzip program. To save you some trouble, I attached an unzip program at the bottom of this page.
• If you're wondering how to take a screen shot in OS/2, try using the PM Camera/2 program listed below. It can save "screen dumps" to bitmap and postscript format.
• If your second partition isn't formatted yet after installation, execute format d: /FS:HPFS to make it a proper, recognised HPFS partition.
• A few last things: it had been a while since I used DOS commands. Remember, ls is dir, rm is del, and mv is move or ren. Also, watch the slashes in the file path.

Back to contents