To make a long story short, I am trying to support older motherboards
that do not support booting directly on ZIP250 disks. When booting on
ZIP disks on new motherboards, the device is always /dev/fd0 and I can
confidently “mount -p /dev/fd0 /dev/fd0t77 /” in my boot image. I am
now configuring a bootable floppy (for older motherboards) that will
then issue the mount command in the floppy boot image. Problem is, the
BIOS sometimes reports the ZIP disk as /dev/fd0 and sometimes /dev/fd1
and the floppy would be the other device. Can I force devices or
somehow query to know how what device the boot floppy is to
automatically in my boot image handle this? I cannot use the altboot
for the second fdx try because this is reserved for other dedicated
alternate boot commands.
System: QNX4.25C
Another quick question, depending on how hard drives are initially
configured, QNX fdisk does not always work. We have been using DOS
fdisk, wiping out all partitions and creating a 2GB primary partition.
This guarantees that QNX fdisk works but is a pain in the a**. Is there
any way around this ?
–
Matt Crowell
Electrical Engineer
Vamco International, Inc.
555 Epsilon Drive
Pittsburgh, PA. 15238
Phone:412.963.7100
Fax:412.963.9511
Matt Crowell <mcrowell@vamcointernational.com> wrote in
news:3C90979C.37F0C7A7@vamcointernational.com:
To make a long story short, I am trying to support older motherboards
that do not support booting directly on ZIP250 disks. When booting on
ZIP disks on new motherboards, the device is always /dev/fd0 and I can
confidently “mount -p /dev/fd0 /dev/fd0t77 /” in my boot image. I am
now configuring a bootable floppy (for older motherboards) that will
then issue the mount command in the floppy boot image. Problem is, the
BIOS sometimes reports the ZIP disk as /dev/fd0 and sometimes /dev/fd1
and the floppy would be the other device. Can I force devices or
somehow query to know how what device the boot floppy is to
automatically in my boot image handle this? I cannot use the altboot
for the second fdx try because this is reserved for other dedicated
alternate boot commands.
System: QNX4.25C
Perhaps you could write a program that would just open() on /dev/fd0 and
/dev/fd1 and you could fstat them for sizes… based on size you could
infer the zip drive and return it to stdout. Then you could shell script
the mount to be: (note the backward quotes)
mount detectzip /
Another quick question, depending on how hard drives are initially
configured, QNX fdisk does not always work. We have been using DOS
fdisk, wiping out all partitions and creating a 2GB primary partition.
This guarantees that QNX fdisk works but is a pain in the a**. Is there
any way around this ?
Sure… to wipe the parition table just use dd if=/dev/zero
of=/dev/[somedevice] bs=512 count=1 . You could adjust the size/count to
wipe the whole (or part) of the drive.
\
Cheers,
Adam
With a PC, I always felt limited by the software available.
On Unix, I am limited only by my knowledge.
–Peter J. Schoenster <pschon@baste.magibox.net>