QNX Neutrino won't boot from flash under PC104 Prometheus

Hi,

I have the following problem: I want to make a bootimage for a PC/104 (Prometheus board from diamondsystems, x86 Processor) to be installed on an external flash (with two qnx partitions), so that the PC/104 can startup from the first partition.

So far I managed to make a bootimage using the QNX Momentics environment under WinXP (I think this uses the mikfs command). Then I connected the flash module to a standard PC (486) running QNX Neutrino and I used fdisk to partition the flash disk in two qnx-partitions and also made the first partition bootable. Next I used dinit (with -h and -f parameters) to transfer the bootimagefile to the first partition on the flash module.

When I have the flash disk connected to the standard PC it boots up nicely from the flash module, but when I connect it to the PC/104 prometheus, it won’t work at all. It gets stuck very early. When booting with the standard PC I get asked from which partition I want to boot (also: hit escape for .altboot …), but with the PC/104 I never get this far. The bootimage should be fine, as it works with the standard PC.

Anyone else who had this problem? I am new to QNX Neutrino, so it would help me to receive a detailed description in case someone knows how to solve my problem.

Can it boot other OSes? If not, you will need to check out the BIOS settings, check diamondsystems website for details.

If you can nail down it is a QNX specific problem, you might want to re-visit the steps as documented at diamondsystems.com/support/faqs/2#16.56 to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

I found it. When transferring the image using the dinit command I forgot to specify the bootloader (the -B option) - it now works fine.