Using MAX PC Format Disk with USB Floppy

[ajabo]

When using the Create PC Format Disk options on MAX to make a floppy disk that should allow formatting a hard disk on a LabWindows/CVI real time target, there is a big problem when the target only has a USB Floppy drive available.

Even though the system indeed boots from the floppy and indeed starts the "Desktop PC Hard Drive Format Disk" program, actually doing some reinitializing of the hard disk (or in this case compact flash disk playing the role), the display shows many times "Warning KERNEL.346530: Error initializing Floppy drive A:" and eventually fails to open source file hdmon.bin (which actually does exist on the floppy).

It seems that once ETS Loader takes over, it does not know that the drive A: is not a real floppy drive.

Is there a version of the utility that does NOT try to access the floppy drive through a real floppy drive controller?

It also seems that the reinitializing of the disk was also not successfully completed; copying the necessary file to the disk afterwards does NOT make the disk bootable for LabWindows Real-Time.

Is there maybe some PC utility that allows building a bootable compact flash, similar to HP USB Formatter for DOS bootable disks? This really would remove a lot of hassle.

[Hossein128]

Hello,

Thanks for your posting in this forum. I think that you can use the link below which is related to your issue.

http://force.natinst.com:8000/pls/nic3/niae_screenpop.main?p_incident_number=1544235

I hope that it could be useful and if you have any question, don't hesitate to ask me on this forum.

Regards,

Hossein

[ajabo]

Hello Hossein,

Thanks for your attempt to be helpful, but sadly the link you provided only leads to unavailable webpages here. force.natinst.com cannot be resolved into an IP address from here and I checked various DNS loopup services online who all report that nameservers ns3.natinst.com and ns4.natinst.com do not know force.natinst.com.

Sorry for not having replied sooner.

I am still looking for a solution though.

Aart.

[Hossein128]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I think that this link will work.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/7E0612D6C15BE1AD8625723B005E579E?OpenDocument

Regards,

Hossien

[ajabo]

Hello Hossein,

The USB stick boots into Win98(DOS), that's good.

But it's the 8.5 RT Disk Utilities that I want to run from that USB stick and the bootloader of the stick only loads IO.SYS and not diskmon.bin or hdmon.bin.

grumble, grumble

thanks for the help so far though.

[Texas_Diaz]

I am a little confused about what your eventual intent is, so I will ask a couple questions that will hopefully lead you to success faster.

1. What PXI controller are you using (or are you using a PC Desktop System)?
2. Have you tried this?  Yes, this says it's for a PC Evaluator, but it is a full RT USB Format/Safe Mode/Evaluator disk.  The boot menu has a format option in it, which allows you to format the hard disk for booting.  This one USB key can do everything all the Boot Floppies can do and more.  And don't worry, the 2011 USB Boot Disk is backwards compatible with older versions of RT so you can use this no matter what version (7.1.1 or greater) that you're using.
• Beware, though, using a Desktop USB key like this will make your target look like an RT PC Desktop - this may make some functionality not available, such as PXI triggering or Watchdog functionality.  However, if you can get the system to boot and run, I can walk you through restoring that functionality if necessary.

-Danny

[ajabo]

Thanks for your input Danny,

1. I am not using a PXI controller, but a PC104 stack with an Intel CPU board and some I/O boards. The CPU board meets the requirements; I already tested a LabWindow CVI application on it via a 32MB flash disk that I managed - also with trouble - to prepare in the past using a system with a floppy drive.
2. I have tried that before and there even seems to be a "Create USB Utility drive" option on Measurement & Automation, which doesn't work to well now that I am running my tools on Windows 7. And until recently the zip file that you mentioned didn't provide me with much result, although with my last retry with some other memory sticks I can at least boot up into a menu without errors.

Despite being able to run the utility disk I still get trouble:

• Invariably, when formatting a flash disk with FAT, I get a succesful completion, but when I boot from the flash disk, I get:
  "Fatal error KERNEL.146040: NoWaitHost specified but no application present ! No host debug possible"
• At most times, when formatting a flash disk with Reliance, the format fails after the message "writing boot sector and chain loader" with an "Error -1: unknown drive I/O write error"

One time I got a succesfully reliance formatted flash disk, that also booted on its own, but reproduction of that result is very hard. Like within the same setup just getting another flash disk with a little more capacity the formatting gave me the error again.

Apparently there are many variables involved.

Maybe you or anyone else can come up with some procedure that has a 100% success rate.

[Hossein128]

Hi,

I found this error in the other forum post and the solution was:

All references to those Kernel errors appear to be CARs that have not been reproducible, or problems specific to hardware in the RTPC. Unfortunately, the Real-Time Module PC Evaluator is not exhaustive: sometimes it reports success when there is still an issue with the hardware being used. Since the typical formatting and installation of software has failed, I recommend the following:

1) Pull out the Hard Disk and format it in FAT32 using another formatting tool. This will require setting up the hard drive as a secondary hard drive in a Windows machine and then formatting it in FAT32.

2) Copy the contents of a working RTPC hard drive to the newly formatted hard drive.

3) Place the harddrive back in the RTPC and boot it.

This should effectively apply the generic RTPC image to the customer's hard drive. If this still fails, then there is most likely a hardware issue. In the future I would recommend customers use a configuration from this (https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-10692) document.

Hope this would help.

Regards,

Hossein

[Texas_Diaz]

You're right, you've got multiple issues going on. 

1. I've never had a problem with creating an RT PC USB Utilities Disk under Windows 7, just had lots of problems with creating individual floppies under Win7 (which is why in newer versions of MAX the individual floppies are disabled under Win7).  Make sure the USB Flash Drive you're using is 1GB or greater (no more than 16GB) and isn't a Kingston - sorry, Kingston drives are extremely flaky.  I've had rousing success with imation or corsair drives.
2. On your PC104, if there is an ability to change the USB Flash Drive Emulation make sure to tell it to emulate a "Hard Disk".  The BIOS will treat media differently based on how the emulation mode is set, and "Auto" emulation is usually the default.  However, I've NEVER seen a system choose the correct emulation under "Auto", even PXI systems don't get it right most of the time. 
3. Be sure to format your PC104 drive using the RT PC USB Utilities disk, and be sure to choose the option to wipe all partitions (I think option 2 in the format menu).  If the disk partition isn't set up quite right, no matter what you do RT won't set up correctly - the "safe" alternative is always to wipe out all partitions and create a single partition, I've never had a system I couldn't get a good filesystem created using that option.
4. The "No application" errors and "unknown I/O write error" usually means bad things on the part of communicating with the drive itself (through the disk controller) or problems with actually writing to the disk.  If the onboard disk has emulation options in the BIOS, you might want to set them to "Hard Disk" as well - this can change how the disk controller treats the drive in an RT context.  Have you ever booted with DOS and run a disk utility on the drive - I wonder if there are intermediate failures with the disk I/O.

The RT PC Desktop USB Utility I pointed you to is your best bet - it has all the latest driver updates for RT, if that doesn't help you get to a point where you can boot your PC104 system reliably, I don't think anything can.

-Danny

[ajabo]

I have finally got a reproducable bootable reliance 128MB flash disk creation procedure for my specific situation.

The CPU used is a Versalogic Manx (VL-EPM)

BIOS setting for flash disk (IDE0) type Physical (LBA did not seem to work on this system for my disks)

(Master or Slave makes no difference, both can work)

It works for a InnoDisk iCF 4000 128MB disk, but not for a InnoDisk iCF 4000 512MB disk, nor for a InnoDisck iCF 2000 128MB disk (Error -1: unknown I/O write error when trying to format).

None of these disks could be formatted in FAT and booted afterwards on their own.

A USB Utility disk created with a recent Measurement & Automation Explorer (version 5.3.1f0) does not boot properly (constant rolling error message of unrecognized OHCI device).

A USB Utility disk created using http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/2700/lang/en as suggested by Danny does boot properly and helped creating a working InnoDisk 4000 128MB disk with reliance.

It is clear that creating a bootable disk is very not straight forward, although you might think it is just putting the right bytes in the right sectors on the flash disk and you should be able to create a working disk with any flash card reader on any PC (provided admin access granted).

The biggest problem is possibly that not all flash disks report their geometry properly (assuming that access will be done through LBA) all the time through the IDE interface and that pseudo CHS settings do not always match the physical sizes even if the size of the disk falls within CHS limits. Some of this might even apply to USB memory sticks that need to be booted from.

When I or someone else (preferrably some NI personnel) has some spare time, analyzing the reliance boot sector code (MBR and OS Boot sector) could maybe lead to a general utility that runs on a PC with a flash card reader, where possibly different CHS geometries can be tried.

Thanks to all for your input so far.