ZIP Drive Issues

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) qdn.public.qnx4
1

Hello,

Got a few Zip drive questions. I have an IDE zip drive, and QNX detects it
as a floppy (fd0). The BIOS seems to treat it more like a hard drive, which
is the way I am trying to get QNX to consider it, because I would like to
use it as a back up device in case the hard drive fails. I have a stripped
down version of QNX installed on a zip disk (by copying it from a hard
drive), but I am not having much like booting up from it: if I disconnect
the hard drive (simulating its death), the computer just won’t boot up…I
set the bios to read the zip and it does (the light comes on and immediately
goes off), but nothing happens.
Any ideas?

Thanks a lot
Luca Callini
lcallini@spacehab.com

2

Previously, Luca wrote in qdn.public.qnx4:

Got a few Zip drive questions. I have an IDE zip drive, and QNX detects it
as a floppy (fd0). The BIOS seems to treat it more like a hard drive, which
is the way I am trying to get QNX to consider it, because I would like to
use it as a back up device in case the hard drive fails. I have a stripped
down version of QNX installed on a zip disk (by copying it from a hard
drive), but I am not having much like booting up from it: if I disconnect
the hard drive (simulating its death), the computer just won’t boot up…I
set the bios to read the zip and it does (the light comes on and immediately
goes off), but nothing happens.
Any ideas?

Don’t be alarmed by the fact that QNX calls it /dev/fd0. This is just a name.

Booting is another issue. The problem is that the Zip drive is an ATAPI
drive. This is a specification added onto the EIDE specification. There
may be a problem with QNX’s boot code being able to deal with ATAPI,
although I’m not completely sure.





Mitchell Schoenbrun --------- maschoen@pobox.com

3

<!doctype html public “-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en”>

Hello Luca:

Try This scripts...

mount.zip:

umount /dev/fd0
slay -f Fsys.dos
mount 'p /dev/fd0
Fsys.dos /zip=/dev/fd0t6 -s &

umount.zip:

umount /dev/fd0

If you not have Fsys.dos try to use Dosfsys...

Good Look!

Daniel Espósito.-

Luca wrote:

Hello,

Got a few Zip drive questions.  I have an IDE zip drive, and QNX detects it
as a floppy (fd0).  The BIOS seems to treat it more like a hard drive, which
is the way I am trying to get QNX to consider it, because I would like to
use it as a back up device in case the hard drive fails.  I have a stripped
down version of QNX installed on a zip disk (by copying it from a hard
drive), but I am not having much like booting up from it:  if I disconnect
the hard drive (simulating its death), the computer just won't boot up...I
set the bios to read the zip and it does (the light comes on and immediately
goes off), but nothing happens.
Any ideas?

Thanks a lot
Luca Callini