Hi, I try to make bootable pendrive with QNX 6.5.0 SDP x86. I burned DVD and run the QNX, but when I try to use mkifs to create bios.ifs from bios.build, I’ve got an info “Unable to open ‘bios.ifs’ : No such file or directory”. I can’t understand this, because mkifs utility is designed to create .ifs file, so why it is looking for it and returning such message.
What you suspect is correct. You can’t build a boot.ifs image when you boot QNX from a CD-Rom. That’s because there is no place to store the .ifs file because all your media is technically read only since you booted from a CD instead of a hard disk or CF card.
There is possibly another way you can do this. You could create a Ram drive and then create your ifs image on the Ram drive. Here is a link on how to create one. I’d suggest a size of 50000 (50 meg).
What you’d do is:
Create the Ram drive (using devb-ram). “devb-ram ram capacity=100000 &” If this command isn’t available you are stuck and can’t do the rest.
1.5) You may need to dinit the ram drive. Use the ‘df’ command to see the newly created disk name (something like /dev/ram0). “dinit /dev/ram0”
Mount the Ram drive. “mount -t qnx4 /dev/ram0 /fs/ram”
Copy everything in /boot to your ram drive. "cp -f /boot /fs/ram
Change to your ram drive. "cd /fs/ram/boot/build
Now create your ifs file. Then copy that to your USB stick
I thought about lack of space either. I decided to put this /boot on USB partition and made .ifs from there. Copied all the files and now I have following fault:
sh: qcc: cannot execute - No such file or directory
Unable to relocatable elf file //x86/boot/sys/procnto.
This is the same response when I created ram accordingly to your reply. All necessary files are executable.
That error message says it can’t find qcc (the compiler). This means the the CD you booted from doesn’t contain a full QNX install.
If I understand what you booted from (the QNX 6.5 install CD) then I am not surprised. That’s meant to install QNX onto a harddrive so you can then run a full version of QNX natively (and do your compilation).
Your only options at this point are (1) Use the QNX install CD and install QNX on a harddrive and run QNX natively on a computer OR (2) install the Windows version of QNX so that you can cross compile QNX under Windows.
Thanks for the answer.
Installing it on harddrive was my first thought, but unfortunately it asks for license. I wanted to obtain a non-commercial license, but I can’t find anything on QNX site. There is a commercial 30 day evaluation license, but my request was rejected. I also wrote them a message about non-commercial license, but I didn’t get a reply.
Do you have informations about getting such non-commercial license and costs of it?
I don’t know what the difference is between the 30 day commercial and 30 day non-commercial license is. We’ve gotten the 30 day license before (not sure which one) when we were evaluating moving from QNX 6 to QNX 7 and I wanted to be sure that QNX 7 would install and work on the hardware we had selected. Once I did that we upgraded to a full license. So QNX had good reason to give us the 30 day license (which ever one it was we got).
In your case, the big question not only from QNX but also from me is, why are you wanting to put QNX on a pen drive if you don’t even have a licensed version of 6.5?
I wanted to use QNX on pendrive, because I have bought a good laptop which unfortunately has no CD/DVD rom and I had to borrow one from my friend.
I thought it’s not going to be a big deal to make a bootable pendrive and use that instead of CD, but apparently I was wrong. For me it would be just easier to boot it from pendrive.
However, in such case, I’ll probably just buy external CD/DVD rom.
That still doesn’t answer the question of what you want to DO with QNX.
Without a license you can’t do any S/W development. The O/S that you are trying to put on a Pen Drive is a very stripped down version (most commands won’t be there) that is meant just to install the fully licensed version.
Hence my question about what you want to do with QNX.
Maybe you would be better off just putting the QNX 6 DVD image onto a USB drive as an ISO file and then booting from the USB drive. There are free tools for doing that. rufus.ie/
I tried few different softwares to make bootable pendrive with that ISO, including: linux dd utility, PowerISO, Xboot. Linux seems to do it the best, but still couldn’t boot from such pendrive, OS not recognizable at all. I didn’t try rufus, however. I’ll give it a try, but I think the only way to make it is to create this IFS from native system and use dloader command to put the loader on partitions.
Edit: Rufus didn’t even accept that ISO, explaining that image is either non-bootable, or it uses a boot or compression method.