MBR not being written to during install of RT to a Desktop Computer.

[weizbox]

Hello,

We have been trying on and off for months in order to get LabView RT to load onto a desktop computer and have that computer boot up directly from the hard drive we installed RT on. First we go through the HD format disk procedure, and it doesn’t give any errors. When we reboot the computer after the install, we can not boot from the hard drive. The hard drive still seems to have Grub (a boot loader that was used previously on this hard drive to run Linux) since it spits out Grub errors while trying to boot. I checked the boot sector of the hard drive, and that seems to have some LabView content on there, and the partition where the LVRT is seems to have the files that should be there as well.

We formatted the hard drive using partition Magic, and set the disk up to have one primary partition that was set to active, and formatted as FAT32. We did not specify a drive letter for the partition while creating it since C:\ was already being used on the computer where we were formatting the disk, and I know that LVRT uses drive C:\ as well... so we didn't want any conflicts.

After all this… no errors during the install.. and still we can not boot from the hard drive. Instead, we boot using the boot disk, which seems to work fine, but we would really like to be able to boot from the hard drive and take the floppy out of the computer that we are using.

Has anyone else encountered any problems like this before? I have read some of the forum posts about people having the same type of issue, but they were able to set the partition as Active and everything  worked out, but that was not the case for us.

Any help is greatly appreciated since calling NI support doesn’t really seem to lead anywhere, and some of them seem like they don’t know too much about hard drives (which is understandable, since this is a very small portion of what they do)

Thanks
-Mark

[TreyB_NI]

Hi Mark,

The Applications Engineer that is working on your issue should contact you soon.

But I'll publically show the troubleshooting steps in case someone else has a similar issue:

1.  Run PC Eval to test to see if your system is compatible with Desktop ETS:
http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/82D66505D86349F38625722C00736AB8?OpenDocument

2.  Make sure you've formatted your disk for FAT32.  It looks like you have done this.

3.  On your Windows partition, run CHKDSK to check your HDD:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true

Trey B
Applications Engineering
National Instruments

[weizbox]

Thanks for your input, but I have tried this many times, and probably have reformatted the hard drive and cleared the MBR and boot sector over 20 times now in differnt combinations trying to get it to work. It seems the boot secotr is being written to, but the MBR is untouched.

Another issue we are having as well is with a Solid State Drive that uses an IDE interface, but has problems when running the  PC Eval disc... even tho it says that only an IDE interface is needed for an RT target. We went ahead and tried the HD Format disc, and it gave us errors as well, but for some reason was able to be booted using the pc boot disc, and we were able to load software on it remotely from MAX. I'm not sure why we had these errors, but I thought I would mention it as well, since this should not be happeneing.

In any case, with either drive, the main problem seems to be that the MBR is not being written to, if that helps you guys figure out what is going on better.

[TreyB_NI]

I'll investigate this tomorrow.

[TreyB_NI]

We have seen unusual behavior before with making PC RT boot discs, and in some cases creating a Desktop PC Safe Mode Disc has resolved the problem.  Try creating one of those through MAX, and let me know what behavior you get.  If you are still having problems, I will escalate this issue into R&D.

Trey B
Applications Engineering
National Instruments

[chatonda]

Trey, Mark,

I first encountered this problem almost 3 yrs ago while installing LVRT 7.1 on a NOVA-8890 single board computer. I had already successfully installed LVRT on ROCKY 4786 boards at the time so I was pretty familiar with the process. After several emails and phone calls with NI Applications engineers, the problem is still unresolved. NI suspected it had to do with drivers and suggested I edit the tnf.inf file. That did not help. In the end, I abandoned the idea of using NOVA boards altogether. When LVRT 8.2 came out, I tried again with same result.

Let me add, however, that in my observation, the MBR does get written to. I say this because when I plugged the compact flash that wouldn't boot without a boot disk on the NOVA board to the ROCKY board, it booted.


Thanks,

Chatonda Mtika
Vancouver, Canada

[chatonda]

Trey,

Since you talked about escalating the issue to R&D, you might as well tell R&D about what was discussed when I faced the problem. I was dealing with Vineet A under service request #7067329, dated january 24, 2005.

Thanks,
Chatonda

[weizbox]

Thanks for the information Trey,

I'll try to run a bunch of different tests today and write down as much as possible about what is going on and what problems I encounter. I should be able to post this information later today.

[weizbox]

Trey,

The drive that I have formatted was the IDE drive I was using previously for the RTOS that was not booting up on its own, but was running when we used the boot disk.

I ran the PC Eval before the format, and everything came back successful.

I deleted the partition, created a new one, and formatted the disk again to FAT32 via Disk Management in Windows XP Pro (just to start clean). After that I ran CHKDSK, and no errors were reported. I then booted using the PC Eval disk, and this time I got this error:

WARNING: Flush from cache to disk Failed

I’m not sure why suddenly I have this error, since all I did was reformat the disk. What should the partition setup as anyways… I have never seen that mentioned anywhere. Is it supposed to be a logical or primary? Should it be set to active?

I will try different combinations since somehow it was working before, so there must be a way to get it formatted correctly. I’ll let you know which one seems to work.

[weizbox]

I'm getting the same error from before while running the PC Eval with the primary partition(and only partition) on the disk set as active, and as well when it is not active. I will go ahead now to try the HD Format disc anyways, and then try the Safe disk, and again with the Eval disk to see if it somehow likes it better after the HD disk.


This whole install process really needs to be placed on a live CD that includes formatting tools so people don't have to second guess if the formatting is correct, as this is taking quite a lot of time and effort in order to get something that just should install itself without problems. I'm really suprsied that the user is the one that has to do the formatting within another OS in order to even get the RTOS to install...


I'll report back if I manage to get the drive to pass the eval disk check