Get the installation floppies (5 disk) from QNX ftp site. Then
when you are done installing QNX4 you can use the CD to install the
rest of the products.
Thanks for the information Kevin. It sure looks like that is the
direction
I need to go. Problem is that I do not have floppy disk, I’m using the QNX
4
Product Suite CD supplied from QNX. This does not allow you to do
anything
but reboot your system this which does not work after reboot. If I use a
created boot floppy ( created during the QNX instalation ) I get the
following error message during bott;
mount -p: open() on /dev/hd0.0 failed: No such file or directory
From here I’m not sure where to go.
John
“Kevin.Beauchamp” wrote:
Hello John:
You wrote:
I’m trying to install QNX4.25C on to a Western Digital 10 Gig drive.
The drive is a WD102AA defined as 16 heads, 63 sectors and 16383
cylinders meeting the LBA translation standard. I have partitioned
the drive using the QNX fdisk command as follows.
Name Type Start End
Number Size
Cylinder Cylinder
Cylinder Blocks
3 QNX 77 4 1025 1022
16418430 8016 MB
4 QNY 78 0 3
4 64197 31 MB
Config: 63 Heads
255 Sectors/track
1027 Cylinders
As can be seen from the configuration that is read by the QNX fdisk
utility the drive is being read as an IDE standard drive. This format
does not match the LBA translation of the drive as define by Western
Digital.
QNX4.25C seems to only recognize the INT 13h BIOS structure for hard
drives as follows.
Heads 63
Sectors/Track 255
Cylinders 1024
Max Cap 8.4 GB
This only gives a drive size of 8.4 GB. It also does not match the
LBA translation format of the drive. The computer the drive is going
to be used on has LBA translation format for modern system, with a
limited ability to modify the CMOS setup for the HD. You can change
the number of sectors being used ( 2, 4, 8 or 16 ) and select a
different LBA Mode Control ( Enabled or Disabled) but that is about
it.
In the past I have been able to set up a hard drive using the above
QNX4 structure. On completion of the setup from the Product Suite CD
I moved the .boot file to the lower partition and did an hinit command
of the section so that the system would boot from the lower
partition. This seems to work fine as long as the BIOS of the system
being used can detect the partition structure.
On a system that has a limited BIOS selection for the HD is there any
thing I can do to get the system to work with QNX. Or does QNX have
plans to come up to date with modern systems and provide proper
translation of the LBA translation format. Or is there anything else
I can do to get QNX to work with a 10 Gig drive. I have tried several
different setups for the drive and in fact was able to go through the
QNX4.25C product update CD. It seem that this is okay until you try
to use the system. then no operating system can be found.
If anyone has ideas I would like to hear then. It is getting almost
impossible to get drives smaller then 10 Gig and they all meet the
proper LBA standard.
Here’re the notes from our first encounter with a HD >8.4GB. Most of our
problems
came from our use of older installation floppies. HTHs:
Problems on Node 70:
A new chassis was ordered that included the following hardware:
- Transduction Gloria rackmount chassis
- ASUS P3V4X motherboard with 64MB RAM.
- Quantum LM10.2 10.2GB hard drive, with shielded 80-pin ribbon.
- original QNX 4.25 installation diskset with v4.25A boot floppy.
(Fsys.eide with >8.4GB HD support.)
BIOS settings:
Since the application code is not fussy regarding the version of the
operating system, it was decided to install the latest version of QNX
(v4.25D). There was a known problem with the version of Fsys.eide on the
original v4.25 install floppies not recognizing hard drives larger than
8.4GB. A new version of Fsys.eide from QNX v4.25A or newer must be
copied onto the boot floppy. This allows the boot floppy to see the
entire 10.4GB size of the hard drive. However, this version of Fsys.eide
is not written to the hard disk during the installation: the installed
version comes from the archive on Installation Data Disk #1, which is
out of date. To install the correct version on the hard drive takes
another step.
Once the installation is complete, and before rebooting, the new version
of Fsys.eide must be copied to the hard drive. With the installation
bootdisk containing the updated Fsys.eide still in the floppy drive,
type the following commands:
umount /dev/fd0
mount /dev/fd0 /fd
cp /fd/bin/Fsys.eide /hd/bin/Fsys.eide
This puts the new version on the hard drive. After having done this, on
rebooting node 70 the system would get past the primary loader and get
the the secondary loader. It would print:
starting QNX…
and then after a delay, it prints the following to the console:
Path=0 - EIDE
target=0 lun=0 Direct-Access(0) - QUANTUM FIREBALL Rev:
mount -p: cannot mount partition 77 (04dh) on /dev/hd0:
error No space left on device
disk /dev/hd0 has 16514064 sectors
partition (63…20065185) does not fit within disk
indicating that the system cannot see the entire size of the installed
hard drive. The problem, pointed out by Alex Cellarius
acellarius@systems104.co.za> > was that Fsys.eide is also bound into the
boot image .boot, and that the version of Fsys.eide that is used for
building the image is the one first installed on the hard drive, which
was out of date.
To solve the problem the system had to be rebooted from the installation
boot floppy one more time. Then the (updated) version of Fsys.eide on
the floppy had to be started manually:
Fsys.eide &
then the drive had to be mounted:
mount -p /dev/hd0
mount /dev/hd0t77 /hd
and finally the prefix changed to simplify access to the drive:
/hd/bin/prefix -R /=/hd/
(Note: all of these commands come from a “Tip” in the online QNX
knowledge base) Then the boot image had to be rebuilt by changing to the
boot directory and running buildqnx on build/hard.70 and images/hard.70.
The resulting boot image was then copied to /.boot. Rebooting after the
rebuild allowed the system to successfully restart using the version of
Fsys.eide able to recognize hard drives larger than 8.4GB.