So, it turns out that the PC Eval disk will always fail
after reformatting the hard drive in Windows, and then trying to boot from the
Eval disk. The PC Eval says that everything is successful only after formatting
a single(and only) primary partition on a hard drive, setting it to active, running
the HD Format disc, then running the
Safe mode disk in order to boot up, configuring the target remotely to load on
the RTOS and drivers.
I thought the PC Eval was supposed to check to see if your
hardware is correct BEFORE you load the RTOS on it…. not afterwards, which
appears to be the only way to run it without any errors.
I have tried numerous times to run the HD format disk at
different points during this process, and I have gotten multiple errors. Some
saying that it can not read files such as C:\hdmon.bin, to telling me that my
floppy disk has errors and cannot copy over boot.exe to the C:\ drive.
I have used different floppy disks as the HD Format disk,
and ran disk checks on them as well to make sure they were operating properly.
MAX has never given me any problems while formatting these disks.
Considering this product costs over $3,000, I would hope
that bugs like this would be fixed, and ‘unusual behavior’
would not be taking place. This entire situation has cost us a lot of time and
money, and has put a strain on projects that we were expecting to be using RT
with. The slow operation of having to use floppy disks, and slow formatting of
the hard drive has made this a pretty painful and time consuming experience.
If nothing else, and a solution is not
found within a few weeks, can the boot sector, mbr, and partition of a basic RT
target(no drivers, etc) be sent so that we have something to work with? I’m
seriously considering looking into modifying our MBR manually in order to get
this hard drive booting on its own, since this seems like our only option at
the time being. If you have any advice for modifying the MBR as well, I’m all
ears.
