I’ve been trying to install QNX 6.1 on a multi-boot Dell Precision 340,
1.8GHz P4, 1GB memory, 2 40GB EIDE disks, 1 EIDE DVD-ROM, 1 EIDE CD-RW.
Windows XP and Linux are already on it.
First I tried installing from the QNX CD dated 2001/06/26. (I’ll call this
the Big CD.) Under XP I built the installation floppy (I’ll call this the
Old Floppy) and tried booting it. I’m able to reach the boot menu by
pressing the space bar at the right time, but no combination of options
allows me to get any farther. In verbose mode I get the following messages:
Starting slogger -l /dev/text
Starting seedres
Starting pci-bios
Range check failed (IO) - Dev 244b - Vend 8086 - Class 10180 - Addr ffa0 - Size
10 Range check failed (IO) - Dev 2442 - Vend 8086 - Class c0300 - Addr ff80 - S
ize 20 Range check failed (IO) - Dev 2444 - Vend 8086 - Class c0300 - Addr ff60
It tends to hang at various places in the range checks.
Looking through the old messages in this newsgroup indicated there were
several problems I might be having:
- DVD-ROMs not yet supported.
- Hard disk and CD drive settings might not have the proper Master/Slave settings.
- Dell P4 processor count appearing to be zero.
The first two problems were addressed by removing the DVD-ROM and making the
CD-RW the master of the secondary EIDE as well as setting the Master/Slave
jumpers on both hard drives. The third problem required patch A.
In the hope that patch A might be included in the downloadable CD images I
downloaded the 30MB QNX 6.1 CD image and burned it onto a CD-RW (I’ll call
this the New CD), then created an installation floppy from it
(I’ll call this the New Floppy). Booting it produced the same results as
booting the Old Floppy had. It appeared that I would need to build a
patch A release myself.
I borrowed a Dell OptiPlex GX150, 1GHz P3, 256MB memory, 1 20GB EIDE disk,
1 DVD-ROM, running XP. I replaced the DVD-ROM with the C-RW from the P4,
moved the second disk from the P4 to the P3, and made sure all disks were
jumpered correctly for Master/Slave. I repartitioned the first hard drive
adding an empty 64MB partition for QNX at the front of the drive and a
1MB partition for it after the XP partition for overflow. When I boot
from either the Old Floppy or the New floppy I get:
Press ESC for .altboot…
then it hangs.
Next I tried a Dell Inspiron 7000 A400LT Laptop, 400MHz P2, 256MB memory,
10GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM, running Windows 98SE. I was able to install QNX
from the New CD under Windows with only one problem. I had to disable
Cardbus enumeration to prevent the boot process from hanging. Without the
Cardbus I could not access the network, and thus could not download Patch A
directly from the repository. But I was able to download the Patch A archive
from the http://download.qnx.com/download/patches/patchA.tgz link under
Windows 98. Under QNX I was able to extract its contents into a temporary
directory that I added to the package installer’s repository list. I then
installed the x86 patch from this patch A directory, a number of developer
packages including C/C++ from the Big CD, and finally the other patch A
packages from the patch A directory. (They needed a C/C++ compiler to
install.)
From this patched release I built an installation floppy (I’ll call it the
‘A’ Floppy) using mkifs on the /boot/build/finstall.build file that came
with the release. The only problem I encountered here was a missing
‘license’ file which I was able to extract from the New Floppy. Booting the
‘A’ Floppy on the P4 produced the same results as the Old Floppy and the
New Floppy. Booting the P3 however got farther. When run in
verbose mode some of the time it hangs after producing the following output:
Starting slogger -l /dev/text
Starting seedres
Starting pci-bios
Range check failed (IO) - Dev 244b - Vend 8086 - Class 10180 - Addr ffa0 - Size
10 Range check failed (IO) - Dev 2442 - Vend 8086 - Class c0300 - Addr ff80 - S
ize 20 Range check failed (IO) - Dev 2444 - Vend 8086 - Class c0300 - Addr ff60
- Size 20 Trying to detect EIDE
Detected EIDE. Scanning for devices.
Starting devb-eide blk auto=partition dos exec=all
\
Sometimes it gets further and hangs after producing the following lines
as well:
Path=0 - EIDE
target=0 lun=0 Direct-Access(0) - WDC WD200BB-75CL Rev:
target=1 lun=0 Direct-Access(0) - QUANTUM FIREBALL Rev:
Path=1 - EIDE
target=0 lun=0 CD-ROM(5) - _NEC NR-7900A Rev: 1.08
I decided to see if I could get any partition installs at all to work. So I
uninstalled QNX from the laptop, added an empty partition at the beginning of
its disk, and tried to install QNX into it from the New CD using the ‘A’ Floppy.
With the previously mentioned exception of the Cardbus problem everything
worked fine. Just as a check I erased the partition and tried the installation
again, this time with the New Floppy. Everything worked fine this time as well.
I’ve run out of ideas to try on these machines. Any suggestions of where to
go next with this would be appreciated.
Emery