Booting From Secondary Master

Is it or is it not possible to boot from a secondary master hard drive
with qnx4.25

I have a dual boot partition (Dos and qnx) with the qnx boot loader and
have no problems booting to either partition when I configure everything

as the primary master. But when I reconfigure everything as a secondary

master, I can only boot from DOS.

I get the following message:

Starting QNX
No adapters found.

I’ve read through and tried changing my sysinit file to reference hd1
everywhere
instead of hd0 as well as changing and recompiling the .boot file so
that
the fsys.eide command references hd1 (shown below)

/bin/Fsys.eide
$ /bin/Fsys.eide fsys -Ndsk1 -n0=hd1. eide -a1f0 -i14 -c15,8944,63,1

/bin/mount
$ /bin/mount -p /dev/hd1.0 /dev/hd1.0t77

Even with the above settings, it boots up on the Primary master but not
the
Secondary master.

According to the QNX knowledge base Ref 3955
http://qdn.qnx.com/support/bok/solution.qnx?3955
it says the following:

Note: BIOS only allows bootable partitions on fd0 and hd0, if you

insist on
installing QNX on another drive you must have a loader that can handle
other
drives, use a boot floppy, or set up a small 2Meg partition where you
can put the
bootable image which will mount the second hard-drive as /.

The QNX loader can not handle booting off of other drives!

I want to be able to do this in case my primary drive fails.
Is there anyway to configure it without a boot floppy or a primary
master (hd0)?

TIA
Cedar Mah
Lacent Technoloies Inc.
cmah@lacent.com

Cedar Mah <cmah@lacent.com> wrote:

Is it or is it not possible to boot from a secondary master hard drive
with qnx4.25

It is technically possible – the OS itself doesn’t really care
where it’s loaded from – the problem is the primary boot loader
and partition loader.

The primary boot loader only gives a choice of 4 partitions. If you
have a primary boot loader that will allow you to select a partition
on the second drive (e.g. LILO), then you’ve gotten past the first
stage. I THINK the RTP primary loader will also allow booting from
non-primary drives.

The 2nd step is the partition loader (the piece that says “hit
escape for alternate os”) – it makes BIOS calls to load the image
from hard drive. It is hard-coded to talk to the first hard drive.
It can be patched, at the binary level, to talk to the second drive
instead, the exact addresses to patch & byte values to put in have
been posted before – but I don’t have a copy of them. (I don’t know
if the RTP partition loader will handle booting from a secondary hard
drive.)

Then, you have to make sure the boot image mounts /dev/hd1, and a
partition on /dev/hd1 (probably /dev/hd1t77) as /. Sounds like you’ve
got that bit already.

-David

QNX Training Services
I do not answer technical questions by email.