For the past year or so we've been involved in migrating several legacy QNX
applications over to Linux/RTLinux. Typically these are embedded PC 486
systems with rotating IDE hard drives. The BIOS's on these older boards
do not allow for autodetection of the C/H/S values for the drive and
therefore must be entered in the BIOS setup.
To aid with the migration to Linux we adopted a frame/cartridge system from
CRU which allows us to very easily swap the box back and forth between the
existing QNX drive and the developmental Linux drive.
The problem is that unless we get identical C/H/S values for the two hard
drives we are bothered by having to reset the BIOS parameters for each swap.
My question is:
"Is there a way to avoid this with the Linux OS? ie. leave the BIOS set for
the QNX drive and have the different Linux drive also boot without having
to enter the BIOS and change things"
The more I discover about the Linux boot sequence "onion" the closer I
think I'm coming to an answer. I recently came across the lilo.conf
"append" parameter which in conjunction with the "hd=" bootparam should be
able to do the trick. The problem is that without the correct BIOS C/H/S
values my machines never seem to get anywhere near lilo.
Any help/advice would be appreciated.
Robert D. Findlay
Senior Software Engineer
FC software Inc.
Tel: (905)659-0512
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.netcom.ca/~fcsoft
--
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with the command "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the message body.
For more information, see <http://waste.org/mail/linux-embedded>.
