I’m trying to boot QNX 4.25e without a video card. I have created a .boot and .sysinit which allow me to boot up without a screen or keyboard, then log in via a serial port.
The board is a Diamond systems Elektra, which is a PC/104 board with a separate video card on the PC104 stack.
All works well, until I physically remove the video card from the system. Then , the boot loader crashes with an error message about a CRC error in Proc32.
I have tried another CPU board, and another flash disk without success, so it isn’t hardware failure. I have tried the flash disk in an ordinary PC without video and it works fine, so I’m doing the right thing.
What makes this a little unusual is that the PC104 card is designed to run without video. It has a mode where the console is redirected to a serial port to allow you to get into the BIOS without video or a keyboard. It works OK when the video card is attached. I have tried turning it off on the grounds that it may conflict with the QNX boot loader, but if I have neither redirection nor a video card the system beeps three times then hangs completely.
The only explanation I can come up with is that removing the video card is somehow changing the memory map and preventing boot from working correctly. If this is case, what can I do to .boot to rectify it?
Cheers
Simon