Question:

Hi. I need to reinstall Smart Suite and the install fails with:

I've checked everything I can think of. I have between 2GB and 4GB of free space on the install volume and on the TMP volume. What else should I check?

Answer:

You have done your homework. These are the typical reasons why the Software Installer fails. Unfortunately, you have been bitten by IBM's tendency to hide information. It would be really easy if the message included a full pathname.

Do you happen to have read-only NTFS volume? If so, this could very well be your problem. When the Software Installer needs to create a work directory, it chooses the volume with the most free space. Unfortunately, the Software Installer neglects to verify that the volume is writable and the attempt to create the directory fails.

Try temporarily hiding the NTFS volume and see if this is sufficient to make the error go away.

If this is not your problem, you need to spend some quality time with the OS/2 Trace Facility to determine the actual volume and directory name.

Question:

I just resized some volumes and I can no longer run chkdsk from my maintenance volume. Chkdsk now fails with:

Chkdsk was working just fine before the resize.

Answer:

This may be another case of IBM's tendency to hide information. Check the THREADS statement in CONFIG.SYS. This statement is often omitted or set to a relatively low value on maintenance volumes. If the statment is omitted, the maximum thread count is 64. Try increasing the maximum thread count and see if this is sufficient to make the error go away.

Chkdsk requires approximately 64 threads for every 9GB of disk volume space. You can use this rule of thumb to calculate a setting that will work for your volumes. However on reasonably current hardware, there is very little reason to not set

Mr. KIA has no real desire to try to explain why the chkdsk programmers decided it was a good idea to translate a perfectly obvious SYS0164 error to an internal SYS0008 error and finally report this as a SYS0546 error.

Mr. KIA also has no real desire to try to explain why chkdsk requires so many threads to function. One possible theory is that it was a good way to maximize head motion during chkdsk processing.

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