QNX 2.2 with Software - read hex error system is halted

QNX USERS QNX2 and QNX4
1

Hi there, iam a new member of this beautiful discussion site.

I installed QNX 2.2 on the newest VMWare Workstation (16MB RAM, 256MB IDE-HDD, FDD), this works fine and quick so far.

We would use QNX for testing Scenarios with a “Weiss Umwelttechnik TS 130”, this is a climate shock setuo with two heat/cooling chambers which has different temperatures, a lift goes up and down to stress the testes materials.

Long Story short: I installed the Software - which are done by the command “backup 1:/ 3:/ +all -p”. Now the bootscreen Shows up the Software and ask to be started “RETURN” = Start, “ESC” = quit. When i try to start the Software i got a message on the screen “READ HEX - ERROR … THE SYSTEM IS HALTED” then i got the normal console prompt $.

Does anybody know this error?

I checked the disk already and QNX say its all fine so far.

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot for any help on this issue.

02
02745×425 7.13 KB

2

01
01772×436 49.2 KB

3

I know a lot about this, but first…

Why on earth are you trying to use a somewhat antiquated OS? Since you are running it under a VM, you can’t possibly using QNX for its real time properties. Wouldn’t Linux be a better solution, or do you have some ancient existing software that you need to run.

It looks like you might have installed by doing the following.

  1. Boot off of a floppy diskette
  2. Mount the hard drive, fdisk it, dinit it and then use the backup command to copy from the floppy

There are a set of install floppy diskettes around somewhere, but it’s tricky to use with a VM since you have to be able to switch them around. It can be done however.

Merely copying the software in the way you did is inadequate. You would have to use the ‘boot’ command. Now this is a bit of a black art, which I will explain a bit about.

QNX 2 was commonly run on AT hard drives which had C/T/H addressing. The disk.at and disk.atc driver used this type of addressing. When LBA drives came around, QNX never updated their driver. I wrote a driver called disk.ata which does support LBA. It’s around.

While in native mode, LBA disks do not have real C/T/H geometry that is visible, however they do simulate it, which is where things get tricky when trying to boot. You have to know what C/T/H geometry the LBA drive thinks it has. You have to put those values in the BIOS. You have to tell the driver those values when you first mount the hard disk and before you fdisk and dinit it. If you’ve done all this correctly, you have to remount the hard disk using the driver you’ve put on the hard drive, even though it is the same driver. After all this you then run the ‘boot’ command, cross your fingers and see if it boots.

I’ve never seen the READ HEX error so I don’t know what it means. You did get a dollar prompt which suggests that something went right. Does the READ HEX appear after the dollar prompt? I would expect so.

When using a VM you have one other work around. You could boot off of a virtual floppy disk, mount the hard drive, and change the search order in the diskette’s init file.

If this is some kind of serious endeavor, I can assist you with getting it off the ground. I have a working QNX 2.2 VM Ware system which I could clone for you.