Archive creation failure

Erick Andrews

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Sep 29, 2008, 3:47:41 PM9/29/08

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I can't seem to find the information on the mechanism (the exe, dll, etc.) of what
creates the system archives on boot up, after the the Desktop Properties
Notebook is enabled for "create archive at each system startup".

I have determined that the os2.ini and os2sys.ini files are not correctly archived
because on restoration at startup, several Desktop icons are blank. I have proved
that the restore process works ok because when I copy good os2.ini and os2sys.ini
files into, say, the \os2\archives\01 directory (from maintenance partition), the
Desktop loads ok. This issue is repeatable. My good ini files are from a backup,
and normal rebooting works fine.

Archiving used to work correctly some time ago, maybe a few years ago.

This system has been quite solid: Warp Server for e-business, Convenience Pack 2.

Any Ideas what I should look at?

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Best,
Erick Andrews
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Marty

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Sep 29, 2008, 6:30:35 PM9/29/08

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ARCINST.EXE is the process which creates the archive. There may even be
some help for it in the IBM help files somewhere, but it's been a while
since I looked. I remember there was a configuration file for it
containing a list of files to include in the archive also. The people
who worked on the eCS installation routines probably know it quite well
if you can get a hold of them.

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Erick Andrews

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Sep 30, 2008, 2:55:30 PM9/30/08

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Arcinst.exe. Yes, I remember now! And arcrecov.exe is its restoration twin.

A quick comparison of them with my maintenance partition yields OK. The
keys.$$$ files look OK, too. I'll have to hack around some more. I'm suspicious
something in that area got smushed with a power glitch a while ago while
doing the last archive.

Thanks.

Lars Erdmann

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Sep 30, 2008, 5:29:59 PM9/30/08

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Erick Andrews schrieb:

>
> Arcinst.exe. Yes, I remember now! And arcrecov.exe is its restoration twin.
>
> A quick comparison of them with my maintenance partition yields OK. The
> keys.$$$ files look OK, too. I'll have to hack around some more. I'm suspicious
> something in that area got smushed with a power glitch a while ago while
> doing the last archive.

What arcinst.exe will do when you run it is that it will replace your
original backup (taken directly after installation: 0X archive
directory) with the current set of files so be careful if you don't want
that to happen. On the other side, it's a good idea if you have made
many changes to your system compared to the original installation.
In your case it might also be a good idea to wipe out the whole archive
set and run arcinst.exe to reset the whole archiving.

Make sure that the files
\os2\archives\os2.key
\os2\archives\registry.key

look something like this:
\os2\archives\os2.key
KEYFILE:OS2.INI
KEYFILE:OS2SYS.INI
KEYFILE:D:\CONFIG.SYS
KEYFILE:D:\STARTUP.CMD
KEYFILE:D:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
KEYFILE:D:\OS2INIT.CMD

\os2\archives\registry.key
KEYFILE:D:\OS2\SYSTEM\USER.DAT
KEYFILE:D:\OS2\SYSTEM\SYSTEM.DAT

also make sure that SET USER_INI and SET SYSTEM_INI in config.sys point
to the INIs that you intend to use (and backup).

Lars