last updated at 30 Mar, 2006 05:35 (2 times)
First, a disclaimer so that no one thinks that I'm suggesting anything illegal here. I think it is worthwhile to point out that IBM's licensing allows for one copy of OS/2 to be running per license. There are no checks in the software for this - it is up to you to abide by IBM's license. But I'm just pointing this out for your sake - if you were to install OS/2 on your friend's computer and it were running on his computer and your computer at the same time, both under the same license - then that could be considered a violation of the license. (okay, disclaimer is now over)...
Actually, it is possible to create an installation Boot CD under OS/2, I've done this many times. And yes, even with the 3 boot disks.
There are several ways to do this, but the easiest way is to use UpdCD, it is available at:
http://xenia.sote.hu/~kadzsol/rexx/sajat/updcd.htm
Updcd has the ability to take your original Warp 4 CD, merge it with Fixpaks, and then create a brand-new bootable OS/2 Warp installation CD - which installs at the latest Fixpak level (or whatever fixpak level you used) so you don't have to mess with installing fixes later. Its quite nice.
*but* - in order to create such an installation, you'll need to have OS/2 running on a machine with a CD drive. If you want to burn your CD on that machine, obviously you'll need a CD burner on that machine properly set up. On the other hand, if you just want to create an ISO image that you can then burn to a CD using any burning application on any system - Updcd will do that too. But for that you'll have to be able to transfer the ISO to the machine / operating system which has your CD burner.
Another web page looking at creating boot CD's under Warp 4 is at:
http://www.goldencode.com/atlos2/notes/bootcd/bootcd.html
The directions on that page show how to go about the process manually, which does work - although using an application such as Updcd is easier.
If you want to burn the CD under Warp, the easiest is probably to install CDRecord/2 and then just have UpdCD do the burn for you. You can find more information about CDRecord/2 and CD Writing under Warp in general at:
http://www.os2world.com/cdwriting/
As for the suggestion of a USB floppy drive, this is actually probably more difficult to do under Warp 4, because Warp 4 didn't include base USB drivers when it shipped back in 1996. So to get it to work you'd probably have to create custom boot floppies containing the base USB drivers, plus the USB floppy driver. That's not to say that you can't make it work. But I've never had any problems creating Boot CD's for Warp (at least not since the process became documented), so I've never looked into installing off a USB floppy.
Hope this helps.