booting problems

GENERAL Help
1

Hello. I have installed QNX 6.2 on a HD in a PC and I’m trying to make it work on another PC (It has no floppy)…At booting time the systems shows…

Boot Partition 1? 1
Hit Esc to .altboot …S

and then nothing happens…There is some way to know what is happening or booting in a safe mode or something like that? (Hitting ESC nothing happens neither)

thanks

2

DForchetti,

The S means that no O/S image was found on the harddrive (see ‘Loading a Neutrino Image’ in the help files).

Since you know you actually have one there, this likely means 2 things

  1. The BIOS on the 2 machines is reporting slightly different harddrive geometry to the bootloader and therefore the bootloader can’t find the image to boot. This is quite common when swapping hard drives between PCs’ that aren’t identical hardware wise.

  2. If your using SATA drives, you may need to go into the BIOS and enable legacy mode or IDE compatible mode.

My guess is that your suffering from #1.

The reason ESC does nothing is because you likely did not put a .altboot image on the harddrive. Even if you did, if your suffering from #1, the .altboot won’t be found either.

There is a safe mode for booting. I think you press either F1 or space to get the list of options when the Hit ESC message appears.

Tim

3

Thank you very much …I think that I’m going to try with F1…even so…the PC where I’m trying to install QNX Its to Old and I cant make the CDROM work in it …there is some floppy disk to install some minimal QNX kernel or I must make my self one with buildfile?

4

dforchetti,

There isn’t a minimal install off floppy for 6.3. At least not an easy one. Your MUCH better off just opening up another PC, removing it’s CDROM and swapping it to the machine that has the bad CDROM. That shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.

Out of curiosity, just how old is the old machine? Some older machines had an issue where the O/S had to be in the first 8 gig on the hard drive. When you install QNX, that option comes up and is mentioned. Newer machines never have that problem. But if your PC is really old, it may be one that does.

Tim