Newbie help request

GENERAL Help
1

There are times I feel really slow. This is one of them.

I’ve seen others told to just run the install. But I hate surprises in mid-install. I’d rather have done my homework and have everything set to receive the new OS.

I have an established Windows XP machine with two internal drives and two USB2 external drives. All drives are formatted NTFS at this time. The machine has 0.5GB RAM.

The primary drive [60GB] is partitioned into two approximately equal logical drives, C: for the OS and D: for incoming data. A third, smaller partition [approximately 1GB] is the XP swap file drive.

The secondary drive [120GB] is partitioned into two logical drives, H: which is empty and I: with archived files.

What is the best way to prepare to install QNX in a dual boot fashion? I’ve heard that only the primary drive can boot. Does that mean QNX has to go into a partion on that drive?

I’ve also heard that Linux needs to have a separate drive for the swap file. Is this true? Does it have a special format?

Should the partion that QNX goes into be formatted in a Linux format? I gather from the bit of searching I’ve done that it should not be NTFS. True?

I have PartitionMagic8.0 available to help out. One article mentioned BootMagic… Is that built into PartitionMagic?

I’ve tried answering all the above during numerous searches of the net with only limited luck. I was hoping that some gru out there would have done a nice syep-by-step for newbies like myself.

Thank you for any help you can offer.

2

I would say keep matters simple and put QNX on a partition in the primary drive.

Linux generally requires a partition for swap, but not a seperate drive. Linux swap has a special format, but your Linux distro will take care of that.

The QNX installer will make it the correct format, you don’t need to pre-format it.

It’s not that bad really, just make a partition on your primary disk of a few gig, and that will be enough for QNX. Pop in the CD instruct the installer to install onto that partition and you’re done.

3

Okay. I’ll move that data area to the empty partion on the secondary. Then I’ll use D: for QNX. We’ll see what happens. Thanks.

4

Booted QNX CD that was created by writing qnxnc621.iso to a blank. Got to the video set up and had to guess a little. Chose fastest refresh I was offered for vesa 1024x768 16 bit display. Next it asked for username and password…

I thought it wanted what I was going to use. Nope. It appears, it has a specific one in mind. I don’t remeber seeing one mentioned at the site. It doesn’t happen to be the ones from the QNX account does it?

5

Heh, one of those unix things. ‘root’ is the user name you need - and by default has no password.

QNX 6.3.0 is easier for the beginner, ie: It’s user login and management now have GUI based tools. Not to mention the user guide. :slight_smile:

6

Thank you. Trying again. I will get the hang of this sooner or later.

7

You don’t really even need to use a swap partition if you don’t want to; you can just create regular files to use for swap space. If you are using a 2.6 kernel, there isn’t even any performance penalty for doing this (the performance hit in the 2.4 kernels is very minor). Consider:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/SWAPFILE bs=1024 count=524288 mkswap /SWAPFILE swapon /SWAPFILE

That will create, activate, and add to current swap space a 512MB swap file. Fiddle around with the values of bs and count to get the size file you desire. Also place an appropriate entry in your /etc/fstab so the swap file is added to active swap space whenever you boot up:

/SWAPFILE               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

-uberpenguin

8

This question has been asked so many times and been in FAQ section for a long time.