If you want to have QNX as your primary OS, it’s better to install it on its own native partition, which is a DOS type79 partition. For this, you’ll have to create a separate partition before the installation. If your drive has a single partition, you’ll have to use a third party utility like Partition Magic to create the separate partition. After this, just pop this month’s PCQ CD into your drive and boot off it. Ensure that your hard disk is configured to be a primary master, otherwise the EIDE driver loaded during setup won’t detect the disk properly and will exit the installation. Once the IDE driver loads, it takes you to the setup and shows you the partition information on your hard disk. Here, you can specify the partition that you want QNX to install on. The setup also asks for the amount of space that you want QNX to use. In this case too, it’s best to give as much space as possible to QNX

Now comes the important part. QNX allows you to use your existing boot loader (if you have one) or you can install its own boot loader. Please read the recommendations at this point very carefully. If you have Win 9x installed and choose not to install the QNX boot loader, your PC will boot up from the active partition. QNX installation, by default, sets the QNX partition as active. So to boot into Windows, you’ll then have to use fdisk to set the Windows partition as active. We’ll discuss how to make QNX and Win 9x coexist without using a boot loader a little later.

Once all the parameters are specified, the drives are remounted, and the file system restarted for initiating file copy. This doesn’t take very long. Once it’s through, remove the CD and hit Enter to reboot when you’re prompted to do so. Your machine then boots up into QNX.

Now let’s come back to the choice of booting into either OS without using a third party boot loader or resorting to fdisk every time. The procedure is a bit cumbersome, but once you understand the basics, there won’t be any problem. We’d seen earlier that when QNX was installed as a file within Windows, it modified the config.sys file to give you the option of booting into Windows or QNX. The loadqnx.sys driver is the one that’s exploited to do this .

Now that you already have QNX installed on its own partition, use fdisk (by booting off a Windows bootable CD or floppy) to set the Windows partition as active. Reboot into Windows. Install QNX as a file into a Windows partition as discussed earlier. This modifies the config.sys file. Now, effectively, you have two boot images of QNX on your hard disk—one on the native partition, and one within Windows. Go to the path where you installed QNX (\Program Files\qnx) as a file within Windows. Here, in the fs directory, rename the QFS files to something else, so that they’re not identified at the next bootup, and reboot your machine. When prompted for the OS in the Windows startup menu (which is derived from config.sys), choose to boot into QNX. And there you are, booted into QNX that was installed on its native partition (because the renamed QFS files within Windows are not identified). You can go a step further and delete those renamed QFS files within Windows.

As far as performance goes, QNX documentation clearly specifies that there’s no difference between an installation as a file in Windows and on a native partition. So, the choice is yours.

QNX with Windows NT/2000/ME

For Windows machines with NTFS, you’ll need to allocate a FAT partition for QNX to install. For this, use any of your existing free partitions after converting them to FAT. Use a partitioning utility like Partition Magic to resize your partitions to avoid losing data. You have to, however, keep certain things in mind while doing this. The partition that you want to use for QNX should preferably be a primary partition and should be bootable. The easiest way to do this is dynamically resize your existing primary partition and allocate it for QNX. Format this partition with a FAT file system.

Boot your machine with the CD. QNX should recognize the free partition. If it doesn’t, look at the partition information and opt to delete the partition that you allocated. When prompted for the amount of space to be used for QNX, select ‘Complete’ and hit Enter. Also, choose to install the QNX Boot Loader when asked for. The installation will do the rest, including converting the partition into DOS type79 (which is essentially a non-DOS system) and copying the OS files to it. Reboot the machine and you’ll boot into QNX. The QNX Boot Loader waits for two seconds for you to enter your boot partition preference. You have to make this choice really fast if you want to boot into Windows NT/ 2000 or you might end up rebooting your machine a number of times.

If you use Linux as a primary OS, QNX can be installed there too. But you’ll need to create a separate dedicated FAT partition for QNX, because the current release of QNX doesn’t support the Linux Ext2 file system. Appropriate changes will also be needed to LILO, the Linux boot loader.