I’m trying to get started using an Advantech PCM-3350 PC104 board with a 64mb CF card as the boot disk.
I’ve used f32qldr to make the CF card a boot disk for qnx, and copied the .ifs file over to it (renamed to BOOT.IFS). This .ifs file was generated using the QNX system builder and the generic x86 bsp (I can’t find the bsp for this board, or it never existed). Now, whenever I turn on the PC104 I get the following:
Bios screen
some text that scrolls by very quickly but seems to be about devices connected to the PC104
f32qldr Version 1.01
Filename /BOOT.IFS
a bunch of #'s
Image read to address 0x00110000
Transfer Control…
Then it does nothing, and after a bit the screen goes black. I have no idea what to do at this point to get this system working.
As a first step I’d suggest connecting a CD-ROM, possibly via a USB-to-PATA adapter, to your hardware, and boot from a QNX CD, to see how far it gets. This will also help you identify which drivers you should be starting in your own boot script.
When the CD-based boot works, I’d use dinit, fdisk, and dloader, to initialize the CF card. I don’t know the tool you used, but AFAIK it’s not officially supported by QNX. BIOS-based boots with media formatted on a different machine always can have “geometry” issues, where the BIOS isn’t able to read the boot image correctly. That’s why it is always a good idea to format the boot media on the device being booted by it later.
A 64MB CF card - quite small, where did you find it?
I’ll see if I can find one of those CD adapters. I found the 64mb card with the stack that we had lying around. However, I just spotted an 8gb one so I’m going to try and do the full x86 install on there via cd and see if I can get it to boot from there first.
Image read to address 0x00110000
Transfer Control…
How large is your .ifs? There is a limit without changing defaults in the buildfile.
Many years ago, I set up a little x86 board to boot from an 8MB CF card that originally came with my digital camera. It booted into Photon, had several network and graphics drivers to autodetect hardware, and even included the Netfront browser engine to show HTML4 content.
With this, I tried to recreate the spirit of the QNX 1.44MB demo disk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0
But apparently nowadays no one cares about stuff using as few resources as possible any more. 