Mort Service <questionbox@re-media.com> wrote:
I’ve got several systems I need to put together with existing
hardware. Unfortunately, that hardware consists of Celeron-333MHz
PCs with 10gig HDs, and the OS is QNX v2.21. I’ve talked
to a company who runs process controls with 2.21 on 233MHz
machines, but I’m having no luck. The machine essentially
starts up, the 2.21 system floppy reads for several seconds,
then stops. I get echo from the keyboard, but no messages
from QNX, and nothing else. I thought that maybe PCI video was
a problem, perhaps I should get an ISA card. I’ve slowed the
bus speed down to 66Mhz, and the CPU to 200Mhz. Any suggestions
from anyone familiar with this version of QNX?
Swapping video cards probably won’t make a difference as it is probably
failing in the timing loops for floppy access.
Can you disable any of the CPU caches to slow things down further?
Do you have any (old) machines around on which you can boot QNX2?
If so, you might be able to move the hard drive to one of these
machines, install there, then move it back and boot from it. BUT,
you are likely to hit a “missing OS” error if you do this – you
have to make sure both machines map the (large) IDE hard drive the
same way. Do you have disk.ata – this was written by, I think,
Mitchell Schoenbrun and handles lba disks, but it probably doesn’t
handle anything beyond the 8G mark (which was the next break point
for IDE drive mappings after the 540M point). So, you may have to
explicitly map your drive as if it only had 8G, and give up on ever
using those extra 2G. (Likely not an issue for a QNX2 system.)
Whatever you do, I wouldn’t even dream of trying to share this
machine with another OS.
-David
