2016-21. Older versions of OS/2 may not be able to open certain CD/DVD folders or even list files within them.
SYS0003: The system cannot find the path specified.
EXPLANATION: The pathname in the command does not exist in the CD or DVD directory before a pathname that comes after it in the expected sort order. For this reason, the system stops looking for the pathname. This happens when using an older OS/2 CDFS.IFS driver that wrongly expects case-insensitive lexical sort order. A CD or DVD directory is in case-sensitive ASCII sort order.
Update the CDFS.IFS driver to version 14.103, 2005-07-28, as supplied with recent eComStation. This version does not have the sort order bug. You may use 'bldlevel \os2\boot\cdfs.ifs' to verify the version. Avoid versions known to have the bug, including 14.20 (1998-10-28 supplied with JCDFS) and 8.263 (1998-10-14) supplied with a Warp 3 fixpak. These alternatives may be used in an emergency:
Because of such issues, it is much better to update the CDFS.IFS driver and not intentionally mangle folder names or degrade to the much shortened ISO-9660 names.
It's difficult to account precisely for the behavior of the system with the old driver. In the first place, it seems that only folder names are affected, not file names. In the second, for folder names, results don't quite match logic. As a hypothesis, it may cache CD folder names in case-insensitive lexical order but when searching for names assume that it is in case-sensitive ASCII order and terminates searches at the first folder name expected to come after the target. Consider the CD order: AB3 AC6 Ab2 Ac5 ab1 ac4. Hypothesizing that it is cached as ab1 Ab2 AB3 ac4 Ac5 AC6 we can predict what will be inaccessible, but we won't be quite correct:
| Folder | Expected | Correct? | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|---|
| ab1. | Accessible | Yes. | It is not preceded by anything that comes later in CD order. |
| Ab2. | Inaccessible | No. | It is preceded by ab1, which comes later in CD order. But it is read anyway. |
| AB3. | Accessible | Yes. | It is not preceded by anything that comes later in CD order. |
| ac4. | Accessible | Yes. | It is not preceded by anything that comes later in CD order. |
| Ac5. | Inaccessible | Yes. | It is preceded by ab1 and ac4, which come later in CD order. |
| AC6. | Inaccessible | Yes. | It is preceded by Ab2, Ac5, ab1, and ac4, which come later in CD order. |
It doesn't matter too much if we don't understand precisely what conditions trigger this bug. Whenever it bars our access to a CD folder is sure to be at the worst possible moment. The fix, as aforesaid, is the later version of CDFS.IFS.
The bug is mentioned in the MkIsoFs readme.os2 file:
"Note that the Joliet implementation on OS/2 is buggy:
"It expects the file in the directories in the wrong order. While Microsoft wants the files to be in ASCII (binary) order, OS/2 likes to have the files in lexical order (uppercase and lowercase together). This makes CD's with Joliet attributes unreadable on OS/2 if there are files that start the same way but differ in case."
Several old Usenet threads discuss the issue. For example, see:
It's confusing, isn't it? But it's not unknown to professionals (). Summers, Clayton. 1993. Introduction to ISO 9660 (53 page PDF). Disc Manufacturing, Inc..