QNX 2.15g issues

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) qdn.public.qnx2
1

Hello,
We’re having problems on a project we’re working on with a company.
They use QNX 2.15g and we have a few questions. First, the partition
table
on one of this company’s machines (was working) seems to be corrupt. From
QNX, the partition table reads:

os name type start cyl end cyl cylinders blocks
— 95 63817 63918 102 102937
— 139 4616 19060 14415 -1439812603
— 219 32295 15689 48931 -1073702934
— 14 48535 8875 23877 1941832562

obviously the partition table is quite messed up. Originally, the
partition
table looked like so,

os name type start cyl end cyl cylinders blocks
qnx 7 0 451 (?) ?

dos 1 452 903 ?

Unfortunately - all that I remember from this table was qnx was partition
1,
dos was partition 4, and they were both split evenly an size (41.4M?).
Originally the QNX boot loader came up and hitting 4 would get into
DOS/WINDOWS, QNX was 1. My questions with this are, is there anyway to
get
the partitions back to the initial way they were? Is there any way to
reinstall QNX without dinit’ing the drive and clearing our data. Any
utilities going to help? I can mount the drive (not individual
partitions)
from within another QNX installation (mount disk 4 /drivers/disk.at p=2)
and
see it as a 82.7 M drive. I just need to be able to boot it again and get
it
back to a running order - I don’t even know how the tables got screwed up.

Is there any way to fix them, install a QNX bootloader and recognize the
partitions?

The actual drive I’m talking of is a Conner CP30084E with 903 cylinders, 4
hds, and 46 sectors. A couple of other miscellaneous questions, I can’t
find
any information about this “y2k” issue with QNX 2.15g but I am definitely
experiencing the problems with it.

Any help to make even just a little progress would be substantial.
Thanks,

Nick Bargnesi Karol Fulara
u_nbargnesi@umassd.edu kfulara@umassd.edu

2

Since your boot sector has been mauled, there certainly are some issues
to deal with. The first would be to put back the partition table.
If you can boot QNX on a floppy, and mount the hard disk driver, there
is a utility, spatch, that can be priceless. You can use it to scan
forward in the disk to see if you can find the first sector of the
partition. This sector is sometimes on the first sector of the second
cylinder. It can be identified by the fact that there is a root symbol

/

in one of the first few lines. Following this sector you will find the
bitmap, which is also easily identifyable. It will usually be mostly
FF’s and 00’s. Once you find this part of the disk, you can jog the
partition table offset until it matches. You can check this by
remounting the partition, and seeing if you can access the disk.
Once this is complete, the final step would be to get the partition
size right.

After this is done, you can use spatch again to try to find the
beginning of the DOS partition. The easiest thing to search for
might be a root directly file like AUTOEXEC.BAT. If you have DFS,
once again, trial and error might help.

It is possible that you will find that more than the boot partition
is clobbered. The technique for dealing with this is much more
involved. You would have to guess where the QNX partition should
start. A good guess would be either at offset 0 or offset 1. Then
you can dinit the disk, to put the root directory and bitmap back.
Finally, you will need to use the utilities scan_for_… to look
for the main directory files, ie. /usr /bin /home /config, etc.
If you can relink these in, then you can rebuild your bitmap using
chkfsys.

At that point, you might want to backup any important files, and just
reinstall.


Previously, Nick Bargnesi / Karol Fulara wrote in qdn.public.qnx2:

Hello,
We’re having problems on a project we’re working on with a company.
They use QNX 2.15g and we have a few questions. First, the partition
table
on one of this company’s machines (was working) seems to be corrupt. From
QNX, the partition table reads:

os name type start cyl end cyl cylinders blocks
— 95 63817 63918 102 102937
— 139 4616 19060 14415 -1439812603
— 219 32295 15689 48931 -1073702934
— 14 48535 8875 23877 1941832562

obviously the partition table is quite messed up. Originally, the
partition
table looked like so,

os name type start cyl end cyl cylinders blocks
qnx 7 0 451 (?) ?

dos 1 452 903 ?

Unfortunately - all that I remember from this table was qnx was partition
1,
dos was partition 4, and they were both split evenly an size (41.4M?).
Originally the QNX boot loader came up and hitting 4 would get into
DOS/WINDOWS, QNX was 1. My questions with this are, is there anyway to
get
the partitions back to the initial way they were? Is there any way to
reinstall QNX without dinit’ing the drive and clearing our data. Any
utilities going to help? I can mount the drive (not individual
partitions)
from within another QNX installation (mount disk 4 /drivers/disk.at p=2)
and
see it as a 82.7 M drive. I just need to be able to boot it again and get
it
back to a running order - I don’t even know how the tables got screwed up.

Is there any way to fix them, install a QNX bootloader and recognize the
partitions?

The actual drive I’m talking of is a Conner CP30084E with 903 cylinders, 4
hds, and 46 sectors. A couple of other miscellaneous questions, I can’t
find
any information about this “y2k” issue with QNX 2.15g but I am definitely
experiencing the problems with it.

Any help to make even just a little progress would be substantial.
Thanks,

Nick Bargnesi Karol Fulara
u_nbargnesi@umassd.edu > > kfulara@umassd.edu

\

–
Mitchell Schoenbrun --------- maschoen@pobox.com