Large disk (500GB)=slow QNX mount?

QNX USERS QNX2 and QNX4
1

I have got quite up-to-date PC HP (XY139EA) Intel Core i5 with Hitachi 500GB SATA HDD and SATA DVD optical drive (IDE emulation for SATA devices in BIOS Setup). During fresh QNX4 install (no other OS, entire disk QNX4 partition, Suite 2011, Fsys.atapi without parameters, -Hdisk500 heapsize in OS image) I understand that dinit on 500GB HDD lasts longer, but when I boot the system:

Hit Esc for altboot…
Path=0 - Generic IDE
target=0 lun=0 Direct-Access(0) - Hitachi HDS72105 Rev: JP20
target=1 lun=0 CD-ROM(5) - hp DVD RW AD-7250H5 Rev: 1HNK

and long-long time nothing. System detects (scans entire?) HDD for terrible 130 seconds. HDD LED lights for that time and is blinking at the end of the time. Then boot continues and everything works.

Is that normal with 500GB disk?
Can I somehow speed-up QNX disk drives detection (some OS parameters)?

Thank you.

2

I’d like to know the answer to this as well.

I see the EXACT same behavior in QNX 6. VERY long detect times of the Hard drive when booting if it’s a very large hard drive.

My solution has been to simply create only a small 10 Gig partition and simply waste the rest of the drive. Not elegant but it works and we don’t need more space than that anyway.

Tim

3

Could this have something to do with the newer drives that have sectors larger than 512?

4

I’m guessing it’s because the bootloader has to find the .boot file which can be anywhere on the disk. I think you can create a boot partition and then a working partition to get around this.

5

Thank you guys, I will try the small boot partition and post here the result…

  1. What is the optimum size and “name” (t77, t78…) of the small boot partition?

  2. Is it possible to create small QNX4 boot partition from QNX4 Install Boot CD (no bootable floppy drive)?

6

No mario, with small (15MB, t78) boot partition the “QNX4 disk detection time” is the same.

But I remember that we already used 500GB (WD PATA) disks without this problem. Maybe these days (5/2012) large SATA disks (or only this Hitachi model?) have some special geometry or newer HP Computers (BIOS?) behaves somehow strange to QNX4, don’t know.