Sorry in advance for this very long question.
I'm trying to upgrade a number of legacy PC's that are running QNX for control and monitoring purposes onto new PC's.
The old PC's are very old and installed on IDE drives.
I have successfully managed to mirror the old drive onto a SATA drive and successfully get it running on an old PC (no where near as old as the originals), that has both IDE and SATA connectors.
One thing worth noting here is that that during the QNX boot up it verifies what drives are connected. In this case it detects the SATA drive as an IDE drive, after not detecting it as a SATA drive. (QNX firsts checks for SATA, then IDE and USB).
When I try to connect the same new hard drive to a newer PC that doesn't have IDE the issues start. In this case, although QNX starts installing off the SATA drive if fails to detect it during its boot process and effectively stalls with nowhere to go.
From discussions and research I found out that I could possibly get a PC that has a BIOS where you can change the SATA setting to act as IDE. So I purchased a new PC that could do that (getting quite rare). Unfortunately it failed again, this time differently. When the QNX boot got to the point where it tries to verify the presence of a hard drive, instead of zipping past the SATA, IDE and USB options, finding nothing, it locked up on the IDE check, just leaving what should have been a rotating /-- in the initial / position, requiring a reboot of the PC, where it just continued to do the same thing.
So now for the hypothesis and questions.
I'm not really sure why QNX is having issues with the new drive; does QNX not verify the SATA drive due to some residual IDE information from the original drive it was mirrored from, confusing it, and why does QNX detect it as an IDE drive when it is SATA?
Where from here? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated as this has been going for a while.
One thought is along the lines of the possible residual IDE info on the SATA drive and if there is a way to overwrite that so the drive is recognised as SATA? I couldn't find anything on Google about that, which makes me thing residual IDE info may be a bit far fetched :).
Thanks for reading and hope you can help.
Cheers,
Markus
QNX mirrored from an IDE drive to a SATA drive issues
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It sounds like you are using QNX4 from your description of the bootloader. Typically a QNX4 system has a specific hard drive driver built into the /.boot file. Most likely your /.boot file was built with the Fsys.eide driver. You need the Fsys.atapi for SATA support or you need IDE emulation in the BIOS of the computer.