EDITORIAL PAGE

IBM "WRITES-OFF" OS/2 & MY 'BONE-HEAD' PROBLEM

    On December 10th, 2002, IBM finally penned what many OS/2 users had reluctantly anticipated for many years: its Withdrawal Announcement 902-274 for OS/2. Such announcements from Big Blue are normally considered the kiss of death for a product. But OS/2 users are still unsure as to IBM's direction with the product. If you visit the company's main OS/2 Warp 4 web site, there isn't a hint of a problem or withdrawal of the product; even their OS/2 Strategy for 2003 section is still prominently displayed.

    Yet, according to the announcement...

    "Effective March 12, 2003, IBM will withdraw from marketing the part numbers licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement (IPLA) listed in the Program Withdrawals section...

    On or after that date, you can no longer obtain these part numbers directly from IBM. You can obtain these part numbers on an as-available basis through IBM authorized remarketers."

    On the surface, the withdrawal announcement appears to be fairly comprehensive, listing the various versions by language and upgrades, including the Software Choice program.

    I recently checked to see if I could still purchase OS/2 over the Internet from IBM; and, lo and behold, Yes, you still can:

    But the real test comes on March 13th to see if IBM is still selling the product. Frankly, I think they will. Why? Not so much because of the general public, but because of the many corporate IT departments that have made strong commitments to OS/2 over the years. I do not believe they can simply abandon it entirely. Sure, they'll abandon selling shrink-wrapped versions of the product, but I think they will continue their shopping-cart/download approach for selling the product (which requires little in terms of support). As I said, the real test comes March 13th.

    By the way, thanks to long-time friend and OS/2 enthusiast, Al Stephan of Largo, Florida for tipping this off to me when the story broke.

    BONE-HEAD PROBLEM OF THE DAY

    I ran into an interesting problem recently which had me scratching my head for quite some time. It was one of those problems that appears to be simple and innocent on the surface, but turned into a bear to figure out. Fortunately, the solution turned out to be something incredibly simple in the end.

    Recently, I had to free-up some space on a FAT partition which shares data between Win98 and OS/2. While cleaning up the hard drive under Win98, I accidentally deleted my "EA DATA.SF" file and, of course, by the time I discovered the problem, I couldn't recover using any of the file management tools I had under either Win98 or OS/2.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the "EA DATA.SF", it is a secret file that is normally hidden from the users view. Yet, it is incredibly important since it is used to record vital OS/2 "extended attributes" associated with all of the files on your FAT drive. In a nutshell, "extended attributes" represents data about data; it is a convenient way to store data about the programs and files on your computer. In its simplest form, "extended attributes" manages pointers, names, and other characteristics of your files. Unfortunately, the full power of "extended attributes" has never been fully exploited by vendors.

    Nonetheless, as I quickly discovered, if the "EA DATA.SF" is gone, everything appears to be gone on the FAT hard drive (your data is still resident on the drive, you just can't find it). This stumps native OS/2 programs having to use the hard drive, especially the "Drives" utility. However, under a DOS prompt, you can still see your files, but you cannot write to them since the extended attributes file is simply unavailable. Bottom-line, for all intents and purposes, anything having to use the drive is dead.

    What to do? Well, first I checked my OS/2 Help files which didn't have anything useful for me. Next, I put out the word to the OS/2 Discussion Group regarding my problem and received some good suggestions, but nothing that solved the problem. I next started researching the problem on the Internet and came across some good notes and utilities for working with OS/2 extended attributes, but nothing for recovering from the lost file. I was on the verge of having to reformat the hard-drive completely (and losing important data) when I stumbled on some clues in a third-party software user manual.

    Fortunately, the answer for solving the problem was as simple as the good old CHKDSK utility using the /F (fix) parameter. There was only one problem with this, you cannot run CHKDSK /F on the drive while the operating system is running (a kind of Catch-22). To overcome the problem, I rebooted the computer and hit the Alt + F1 key combination as soon as "OS/2" appeared in the upper left corner of the screen. This allows you to go into a command prompt mode without the burden of the whole operating system. From there, the CHKDSK /F command ran smoothly and rebuilt my "EA DATA.SF" file, thereby putting me back in business.

    What is the lesson of this little "bone-head" exercise? (I call it "bone-head" since it was stupid of me to delete the file under any circumstance; I should have known better). First, consider running backups of your "EA DATA.SF"; Second, avoid making the same mistake twice, and, Third, remember the usefulness of the CHKDSK command, a utility that is often overlooked by OS/2 users.

    Keep the Faith!

   

- Tim Bryce
Editor, OS/2 CONNECT

Please do not hesitate to send me an e-mail