FIXED: Boot hangs at 'Hit Esc for .altboot' (and many '...')

GENERAL Help
1

I reinstalled 6.3.0 on my Dell Optiplex PIII machine, on which 6.2.0, 6.2.1 and 6.3.0 have all run perfectly before, but though the initial install seems to go without a hitch, the post-install first boot hangs at the ‘Hit Esc for .altboot’ message followed by row after row of ‘…’. Are there some online docs or existing posts in the forums that cover this symptom?

FYI: For this install, I had three BeOS primary partitions on the slave drive, and let the QNX installer create a new QNX partition after those. I’m using BootIt NG for the boot manager. This is basically identical to working configurations I’ve had on this PC in the past.

What’s curious is that I happened to have a backup image of the QNX 6.3.0 partition from the previous installation, and just as a test I restored it (in place of the non-bootable, new installation) and it worked perfectly. (I do want to do a clean install of 6.3.0 SP2, though.)

Things I’ve tried:

  1. Two different 6.3.0 install CDs, from different downloads and burned on different machines (MD5 Sums checked on both)
  2. Reinstalling 6.3.0 several times with different options (‘Force a Partition Install’, etc.)
  3. Installing 6.2.1 instead – same problem

I appears that I can boot the new installation from the install CD, but it doesn’t seem to function properly.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

2

Try to run (very carefully)

spatch /dev/hd1t79

and check the byte at offset 0x11. If it’s 0x80 change it to 0x81. Don’t edit anything else.
Eduard.

3

It worked! Thanks, ed1k.

I’m assuming that I just edited the value at offset 0x11 of the bootstrap code in the boot sector of the QNX partition. (spatch is a handy utility.)

What did I just change, and where can I find docs on the bootstrap code?

4

Your assumption is correct. You changed byte at offset 0x11 in QNX boot sector from value 0x80 (first hard drive in BIOS notation) to 0x81 (second hard drive). The fact that QNX installer still is incapable to install QNX correctly to any drive but first is very old and mature QNX feature. They assume you will reconnect hard drive with QNX as a primary master as soon as QNX installed. Docs are spread all over the place, AFAIK there is no single document. Check utilities reference for dinit and dloader. -d option does the job. In addition to QNX documentation these resources are useful:
parse.com/~rk/articles/bootfast.html
ed1k.qnx.org.ru/loaders.html