Increasing The Primary Boot Loader Delay To Select A Partition

INCREASING THE PRIMARY BOOT LOADER DELAY TO SELECT A PARTITION

Here are the instructions to follow if you wish to increase the the time to
select a partition at the prompt:
QNX Loader
Boot Partition 1

The delay while waiting for a keystroke is accomplished by counting timer ticks,
which are approximately 55ms each. The current value is 0024 hex, which is
36 x 55ms = 2 seconds.

Change the count to one of the following, or calculate your own. The values are in hex.

  COUNT   DELAY
  0024     2 seconds
  010E    15 seconds
  0438    60 seconds

Note that the least significant byte preceeds the most significant, so 0024 appears on the screen as 24 00.

Use spatch to directly modify the primary boot loader, which is the zeroeth sector of hard disk 0.

fdisk /dev/hd0
In the middle of the screen, find the timer count value is indicated above with [24 00] in red.


00001:080:  EE B8 31 00 03 C6 A2 84  07 BE 68 07 E8 C5 FF B9

00001:090:[24 00]B4 01 55 51 CD 16  59 5D 75 17 06 BA 40 00

00001:0a0:  8E C2 26 8B 16 6C 00 26  3B 16 6C 00 74 F9 07 E2

00001:0b0:  E1 EB 20 B4 00 CD 16 3C  31 72 18 3C 34 77 14 E8

IF THE OTHER VALUES ON THE SCREEN DO NOT MATCH, THEN YOU HAVE A DIFFERENT VERSION OF THE BOOT LOADER - DO NOT CONTINUE, OR YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO BOOT YOUR SYSTEM !

Choose Edit. Navigate with the arrow keys and overtype the 24 00 with new values you have chosen. Be sure you do not accidentally change any other bytes. Use the keypad grey plus key to terminate Edit and choose Save, then Quit.

You system should now boot, but with a longer delay.

If you have made an error and cannot boot your system, re-install the original loader as follows:
Boot the system from the QNX Boot Diskette.
Mount the Fsys driver that matches the type of disk controller you have:
example: Fsys.eide &
fdisk /dev/hd0 Choose Loader, then Save, then Quit
This will re-install the primary boot loader.

Note: These instructions are for typical situations. Individual configuration may differ.
If you have any questions, please contact us for assistance.