Labview Real TIme OS

[CAss1e23]

I am currently using Labview 2016 with a PXI chassis with Labview Real Time OS. We generated some labview code and have been running it for the last 6 months or so. A couple of days ago when booting up the system to start testing the PXI chassis came up with the following message, 'no software installed' and the IP address was reset to a default IP address. I was able to reset the IP address to what we were using and reinstall the needed software on the PXI chassis.  Everything has been running fine up to this point. My question is, what causes this error to occur, out of the blue?

[Bob_Schor]

How old is the PXI Controller (the double-wide unit in the first slot)?  It contains an Intel PC, complete with a "coin" battery that keeps the memory intact when the power is off.  If that battery runs out of juice, you'll lose memory and will have to reinstall software.

Bob Schor

[CAss1e23]

Bob,

Thanks, for the quick response.

We got the controllers a couple of years ago.

Does the battery recharge when the PXI chassis is powered up? How can the status of the battery be checked?

[Hooovahh]

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CAss1e23 wrote:

Does the battery recharge when the PXI chassis is powered up? 

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No, these are not rechargeable batteries and are little coin cells, the type of thing that you would have in a watch 10 years ago.  They are in just about every motherboard on a normal desktop PC.  I'm not convinced this is your problem, but you can check it by removing the battery and testing it with a DMM, and replacing it if the voltage is lower than expected for that battery.

I've never known a dead battery to wipe software on the PC.  You might be seeing the signs of a hard drive failure.  

[CAss1e23]

So, I do not think it was the battery. After I reinstalled the S/W the issue has not repeated. If it happens again, I will see if I can attach some data to help determine the cause

Also, the hard drive is only a few years old.

[rolfk]

There is theoretically a small chance that a failing CMOS battery might cause a BIOS error that could make the disk partition seem to be empty. But the worst I have usually seen when that battery goes dead is that the BIOS starts up with default values for the realtime clock and resets certain BIOS registers that might result in a less than ideal performance since the internal PCI bridge and DRAM access timing runs then with usually pretty conservative default values.

Harddisk errors while not very common are however nothing that should be discarded without some serious investigation. We recently had lots of total failures with notebooks that used less known brands of SSD harddrives after less than half a year of operation. This was a hard lesson that a few dollars saved can be sometimes a rather expensive exercise.