OS/2 FixPak installation from hard drive

January 26, 2008

IBM unlike MS provides (well, not anymore) fixpaks in the form of diskette images. Because floppy disks are notoriously unreliable, slow  and expensive these days, it is much better to install FixPaks using other method - extract the content of all the diskette images to hard drive and then apply it to your OS/2 installation.

You will need the following:

1. FixPak files (from IBM FTP server)
2. latest version of RSU Corrective Service Facility (CSF) (from IBM FTP server)
3. DSKXTRCT utility for extracting the diskette images (from Hobbes FTP server)

Then follow these steps: 

1. Extract CSF ZIP archive into a directory, for example C:\FIXPAK.
2. Use DSKXTRCT to extract all the diskette images to the same directory using syntax:

    DSKXTRCT /S:<name of image file(s)> /T:<target directory>

3. Start FixPak installation using following command:

    OS2SERV <path to CSF directory> <path to FixPak directory>

In our example it would be OS2SERV C:\FIXPAK\CSF C:\FIXPAK

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