Bootloader problems

QNX USERS QNX2 and QNX4
1

I am attempting to install an Adaptec 39160 SCSI card with AIC-7899G with a single hard drive on a Dell Poweredge 2850. I am booting QNX 4 from an ICP Vortex SCSI RAID card using the drives connected to that.

Copied one drive to the other (booted using live CDROM Knoppix, used dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=2k).

Drive would boot using the ICP Vortex, and although the RAID card complains (because the drive was cloned from a 2 drive RAID-1 array and that RAID card stores its configuration information on the hard drive), everything works correctly. Drive would not boot using Adaptec 39160 (“No boot device available - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility”).

Note that I am able to mount the drive successfully under QNX 4. I boot from one drive connected to the ICP Vortex and then mount the other drive that is connected to the Adaptec. On other attempts I have installed Linux onto the drive connected to the Adaptec and successfully booted from that drive. The card works and is bootable.

fdisk on /dev/hd0:

[code] Name Type Start End Cyls Blocks Size Boot

  1. QNZ 79 0 5 6 96327 47 MB *
  2. QNX 77 6 4425 4420 71007300 34671 MB warning[/code]

The drive is mounted in the .boot file with these parameters:
/bin/Fsys.gdthscsi
$ /bin/Fsys.gdthscsi -v

After changing it to this:
/bin/Fsys.aha8scsi
$ /bin/Fsys.aha8scsi
and doing a make, copying to .boot it still won’t boot under the Adaptec – same results with the computer reporting no boot device available.

My guess is that the bootloader for the two needs to be different. I’m not getting the QNX loader errors of “Invalid Partition Table,” “Error Loading Operating System,” or “Missing Operating System.” Doing an “fdisk /dev/hd0 loader,” connecting the drive to the Adaptec, and rebooting has no effect – same error message of no boot device available.

Booting from the QNX installer CD version June 2009 has been hopeless – calling the Fsys.aha8scsi driver from the floppy simply blows up/goes nowhere/is highly frustrating even with using the steps of /ram/bin/Fsys.aha8scsi and the like.

Any suggestions on how to get this to boot on the Adaptec?

2

Linkman,

I’ve encountered similar problems under Windows when using RAID 1. I took 1 drive and put it in another machine and it wouldn’t boot (missing O/S from the BIOS) yet all the files were there when I booted from a USB and viewed the hard drive.

It seems that RAID controllers use a custom master boot record (MBR) that only the controller understands. I believe if you re-write the MBR you’ll be fine (never tested this).

dtidatarecovery.com/converting-r … gle-drive/

Or it may be better to instead get a 3rd drive, install QNX on it then put it in your poweredge machine (the one you can boot from) and then copy over the files.

Tim

3

Tim, I believe that you are correct in that the ICP Vortex RAID puts its config and interferes with the MBR. I was unsuccessful with the usual QNX utilities to rewrite the MBR and get it to use the secondary loader. Instead I did a bare metal install from the hard drive I could boot from (the hard way, no installer) and was able to get it to boot QNX using the Adaptec card.

BTW, I have no idea how to get LILO properly installed and configured to get it to run the OS loader for a drive that was partitioned using QNX4. Both LILO and Linux fdisk utilities complain to no end about incorrect QNX4 partitions… Doesn’t matter to me now since I aborted on the LILO method.