NBX Hard Disk Replacement

Warning! This does not work as is

If the hard disk on an NBX 100 dies or get corrupted to the point where it won't work, this may get you going again.

Note, this is a work in progress and may not work properly.

This assumes you have access to a few things.

• A NBX CD with any version. Don't use the newest if you have an older version.
• A good working IDE hard drive thats at least 4mb.
• A PC running linux.
• An NBX that doesn't have to work till support can fix it.
• A program that will unpack compressed tar files. zcat and tar will do this as well gnu tar or maybe even something like winzip.

Wipe the disk unless its new. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd bs=1Mwill fill it full of zeros. Make sure you get the /dev/hdd bit right, this command will trash a disk with no warning.

Partition the disk. You can use fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk or fdisk under Windows. You will need to create one FAT16 partition that holds the boot info and copies of the initial files. This partition is about 321 mb on my system. The empty space at the end of the drive will become the htfs partition.

Next you need to copy some files into the dos partition. You can do with with the linux tool mkfatimage16, mcopy or just mount the partition and use cp. Under DOS, just use the "copy" command. Load the CD and unpack the R?_?_?.taz file. Inside that you find a number of files you will need.

Files to copy into dos partition
• bootnbx.ver
• bootnbx.sys
• nbxsys.cfg
• ncpflash.bin
• Files to copy into R?_?_?
  • htfs.tar
  • nboss.cfg
  • vxWorks

Put the drive in the NBX and turn it on. It should normally and give you a nbx100> prompt. If you get complaints about the disk having problmes from the htfsFsck program. You can kill it with the command td nbxTaskInit. You can type that while its displaying info. If your working on a corrupted system, you may need to type this command before the htfsFsck program locks up. If you make a typeo, you must send a real back space (ctrl-H) or a ctrl-C will delete the line to allow you to start over.

Make the htfs partition using the nbxMakeHtfsPartition. This will create the partition and create some directories. There is also a diskInit command and diskFormat may be useful but I don't know how it works. diskInit /htfs0 will reformat the htfs0 partition but only seems to work sometimes while nbxMakeHtfsParition always seems to work.

Next set up the basic IP network with the nbxIpConfig. Answer the questions for your network or take the defaults.

The last step is to restore the data. type cd "/htfs0" to get into the correct area of the disk. You can get a directory with ll or ll "/htfs0/R2_8_8" to list files in a subdirectory. Next type vxtar "xvf","/dos0/R2_8_8/htfs.tar" which will unpack the needed files. Reboot and you should be able to use the web browser interface with the address of http://192.168.1.190/

Then do a software upgrade. If you have a newer version, install it using the web interface and delete the version that you installed on the disk just in case it has unnoticed side effects.