PCI-232/16 installation issue on XP embedded

[kronhamn]

Hi,

I am trying to install a NI PCI-232/16 card on an Intel D201GLY2A (mini-ITX) based machine running Windows XP Embedded (SP2). I am fairly concerned that my image is not lacking any basic requirements or system components required for the installation, but I cannot get this card installed. I have tried all available driver versions (1.50, 1.70, 1.80, 3.20 and 3.40), the two latest versions will typically fail with some error message *not* revealing any details about the failure. Previous versions will happily install without errors. XPe will not find any appropriate driver (*.inf-file) when the installation completes.

I have successfully installed and used the card on a second machine (standard XPSP2) and found out that the card "NI PCI-232/16 Multifunction Parent" uses the driver-files \windows\system32\DRIVERS\mf.sys and \windows\system32\DRIVERS\NiSerial.sys. The entire properties for the com-ports will typically be found under the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\MF. Could it, with this information, be possible to perform a 'manual' installation of the card on my XPe-machine (i.e. manually copying files and performing some advanced registry hacking)?

Fredrik 

[kronhamn]

Solved! I copied the contents of the folder \National Instruments\NI-Serial\Drivers\Plugin from my development machine to the XPe target device. The folder contains the necessary .inf-files for the installation. I then exported some registry keys (subkeys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet) from the same machine and installed them on the target. You will easily find these keys by searching for the ClassGUID 4d36e971-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318. The target device recognized the new hardware after reboot and I could manually continue to install the driver by pointing out the inf-files in \NI-Serial\Drivers\Plugin.

@NI development team: please provide (embedded) developers with driver-only installation instead of bloated 300Mb+ worth of software that is not needed to just install the hardware adapters.

If you are interested in a more detailed description of the above install, just post to this thread. 

Fredrik