Booting alternate OS on Compaq Armada 1700

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) comp.os.qnx
1

Hello,

I’m a complete QNX newbie and have just installed the OS in its own
partition on my Compaq Armada 1700. It runs great. However I can’t boot
to the alternate OS (Win98). The QNX bootmanager says that I have to
press ESC to boot to the alternate OS, but it doesn’t work. After
pressing ESC it still boots up QNX.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Olaf

2

Olaf Schuchardt <kows@writeme.com> wrote:

Hello,

I’m a complete QNX newbie and have just installed the OS in its own
partition on my Compaq Armada 1700. It runs great. However I can’t boot
to the alternate OS (Win98). The QNX bootmanager says that I have to
press ESC to boot to the alternate OS, but it doesn’t work. After
pressing ESC it still boots up QNX.

Thanks in advance for your help!

You’ve been caught by a terminology question. The “alternate OS”
that the boot sequence refers to at that point is the OS image
contained in the file /.altboot (as opposed to /.boot, the normal
boot image). Both are QNX (although some folks with QNX RTP
installed on a QNX4 partition have taken to using .boot for RTP
and .altboot for QNX4).

What happens is this:

Primary boot loader

  • takes over from BIOS, and looks at your boot disk’s partition
    table, looking for the bootable partition; once it finds
    it, it hands over to the secondary boot loader sitting on
    that partition
  • at this point, the screen should have something like "booting
    partition "
  • if you want to boot from another partition, type its number
    during the 2 or so seconds that the message is on the screen.

Secondary boot loader (at least the QNX one)

  • gives you the option of booting with either .boot or .altboot
  • starts the OS image

I’m simplifying wildly here, but this should give you the basics.
There was a good section on this in the old QNX4 Installation &
Configuration manual. I’m not sure if the online “work in
progress” RTP sysadmin. guide has the material yet. I believe a
search in the QDN knowledge base would have found this answer,
though.

Anyway, I hope this gets you going.


Norbert Black
QSSL Training Services

3

You can also use the multi-boot loader like XOSL. It recognize QNX
partition easily and it’s free. More information on http://www.xosl.org

Adam

It works better with MS-DOS than FreeDos.



Olaf Schuchardt wrote:

Hello,

I’m a complete QNX newbie and have just installed the OS in its own
partition on my Compaq Armada 1700. It runs great. However I can’t boot
to the alternate OS (Win98). The QNX bootmanager says that I have to
press ESC to boot to the alternate OS, but it doesn’t work. After
pressing ESC it still boots up QNX.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Olaf