The worst installation program EVER

[inflater]

Hi,
I have two LBA-enabled hard disks on my testbed, a 9,5 GB one, where resides MS-DOS at 200 MB partition, Windows 95, Windows 98 etc., and a empty 4GB hard disk, also LBA-enabled. Both HDDs are with UDMA 2. I've created to the second hard disk a 900 MB FAT partition for the upcoming installation of OS/2...

So, just were installing OS/2 Warp 4 to my testbed. First, OS/2 FDISK could not work with partitions (except deleting) on my second 4GB hard disk, it said "the partition table could be corrupted", even that I was using LBA all the time. One hour killed by tweaking, next I've downloaded two patches to the install disks. Now it seems to be alright, altough for a strange reason I could set the second HDD's FAT partition "startable", but not "installable". Two hours killed again by searching on the internet. So I downloaded the OS/2 CD version and all the patches [three hours killed btw], because I didn't have like 40 "1,8MB" diskettes available. But hey - 1st disk's 1st partition seems to be "installable", but 2nd disk's 1st partition (I tried to resize it to 200 MB FAT16) didn't. Weird . So I migrated MS-DOS off to the first partition to the 4GB disk (the 900MB partition), but hey - this CD release of OS/2 needs "at least" 175 MB (comparing to the original MS-DOS first disk partition = 200 MB)... Gah!

So I deleted the shared WinNT pagefile to free the space on the MS-DOS 2nd disk's partition (NTLDR is there), resized the partition to be able to move MS-DOS back to the 1st partition and leaved the now-former 900MB DOS partition to OS/2. 30 minutes killed. Coudln't set the 2nd disk's partition "installable" again!
So I disabled detection of primary master disk (where ms-dos and all things reside) and OS/2 *did* detect the HDD , so I got really mad and physically unplugged the primary master disk and now the 900MB partition of the 4GB disk seems to be installable. Hooray!...

After this installing and such, I've plugged back again the primary master disk and added a new boot option - OS/2 from second hard disk.
(I'm using opensource bootloader GAG with chainloaded NTLDR - NTLDR for loading DOS and Windows NT kernels. They exist both in the primary master disk [the first disk, the 9,5GB one], NTLDR is on the MS-DOS partition).

So, the worst installation program (for a OS) is for me the OS/2 one. Even Win98 install program wasn't so "hyperactive"... -> But to say the truth, OS/2 looks nice and it's stable.

Do you have met with similar weird installation programs (OS or software) too?

Regards
inflater

[JackScott]

Funny you should mention that. I have a story about a little program that couldn't. It's name was "Office". Would you like to hear it? Yes? Okay then.

This morning, actually, I decided to upgrade my Dad's computer from XP to 2007, simply because I had a spare copy of 2007 lying around. I uninstalled XP, which was fine. I installed 2007, which was fine. I went to run Word 2007, and it did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I restarted the computer. Still, clicking on the icon did nothing. Not even a hard drive flash. No error message. Nothing. Unimpressed, I uninstalled it and went back to XP. And that's when the trouble started.

I installed XP and went to run it, and it complained "Not installed for the current user." I went on the Internet; Microsoft has a KB article for this. Needless to say, it doesn't work. Neither do any of the other 'fixes' that are on the Internet. I try everything, reinstalling the software about 4 times. Each time, it was further away from working.

Finally, I tried installing 2007 again. Still no luck, it refused to do anything (and the Internet, wise as it may be, did not find anything). At this point I had spent 3 hours working on the problem, and my Mum wanted to use a word processor. So I downloaded OpenOffice 2.3.1 from a network share (my computer, where I installed Office 2007) and installed it. Worked fine.

What annoys me is; my job basically consists of installing:
a) Wireless networks
b) Office 2007
So I should be able to do it. I can do it. But I've never seen anything like these two problems. Final word: Annoying.

[01000101]

I try to cut-down physical harddrive allocation and put virtual harddrives in its place.
right now in VPC I have OSX Leopard and OS/2 Warp w/ tcp/ip on my virtual partitions, makes things alot easier.

as for the office thing, I had a similar issue but it was with upgrading Nero.