6.3 dinit vs. 6.5 dinit

I have little experience in this area so I’m hoping that someone can shed some light on this…
We recently purchased some new hardware (AT type platforms) which we installed QNX 6.5 on, with minimal issues. Since we really didn’t want to upgrade our OS if not needed, we tried to install QNX 6.3 onto the new hardware. The install process appeared to work fine with no issues until I attempted to reboot after the install was completed. Upon reboot the system would hang with the American Megatrends, Inc. BIOS banner displayed along with its version (2.11.1210). If I rebooted and pressed the F2 key, which should enter BIOS setup, the same hung condition occurred displaying the same AMI screen. I even held the F2 key down, which I believe should have given me a BIOS keyboard error and should have entered BIOS, but still no change in the resulting condition.

After some debugging I determined that the dinit command (dinit –qhRN /dev/hd0t79) being used in the 6.3 install CD appeared to be the problem.
After the hard drive was put in this condition the only way I could fix it was to pull it out of the new hardware and install it in one of our older hardware systems, AMI BIOS version 02.57 (where it would boot!) and either delete the boot sector using ‘dd’ or run the dinit command (dinit –qhR /dev/hd0t79) found on the QNX 6.5 install CD. This scenario was repeated with 3 different size SATA hard drives.
In addition, I just happened to install a solid state drive (SSD) that I had laying around and I successfully loaded 6.3 on to the new hardware and could boot and enter BIOS with no dinit issues. Upon further investigation I found out that 6.3 does not support some of the newer chip sets used on the new hardware but would still like to understand what is happening with this dinit that hangs the new system.
Does anyone have any idea as to what is going on? Thank you in advance for any information that can be provided.
Regards, Steve

Is it 6.3 or 6.32 by any chance?

I can think of two possibilities. I don’t know why you are blaming dinit? You said it installed properly. All dinit does is write to the disk. It was a reboot you had the problem with.

The first thing to note is that you are using SATA drives with QNX 6.3. I don’t think there is a SATA driver in 6.3. That means you must be using BIOS emulation? Maybe that is where the problem lies? You might want to check in the BIOS to see if there are any options to try.

The second thought I had, was that I have a machine that had a problem when I upgraded from 6.30 to 6.32. What happened is that the default .boot file got bigger, I guess too big for the BIOS. It would try to boot, but hang. The default .boot file has a lot of extra “just in case” drivers. By building a custom .boot file on another machine, I solved the problem.