LabView RT 8.2 ETS Target, boot sector/mbr trouble

[weizbox]

Hello,

I am trying to turn a desktop computer into a RT Target, and so far it seems I am able to boot it up using the boot disk, but I am unable to boot from the hard drive itself. I have tried using the HDD Format disk so that the boot sector is being written to, but when the computer boots up, it does not seem that the boot sector has been written to.

I have tried this with two seperate hard drives, one that I totaly wiped clean (including the mbr), and one that previously had Linux running on it. The one that I wiped clean comes back and tells me that No Operating System was found. With the one that previously has Linux on it, it still seems like it is trying to load up grub at the begging until it does not find the boot partition since I had wiped it clean and just made a single FAT32 partition on it for LabView RT.

I really would not like to use the floppy drive as the computer I am using for this is a 1U and does not have space for a standard floppy drive which is all I have at the moment, and as well I would think not using the floppy would speed up the overall boot time of the system.

During the install of RT onto the hard drive, everyhting seems to work out fine and tells me that the boot sector has been written to and shows me no errors.

Has anyone run into this problem before or know another way to go about installing that may yeild better results?

-
Thanks for any help,
-Mark

[Ching_F.]

Hi Mark,

Can you please try something else?  Create a Desktop PC Utility USB Drive in MAX.  Using this, you should be able to format the hard drive and install RT software.  Once you have done that, see if you are able to boot from the hard drive.  I would recommend using the hard drive that has been completely wiped clean.

Please let me know how this works, and let me know if you have any other questions.

Best of luck, and have a great day!!

[weizbox]

I actually did end up trying that out, but without any luck on the formatting end. MAX told me that it could not find a USB drive, but Windows seemed to pick it up just fine. I have tried this on two seperate computers with the same results. I was only using 1 USB flash drive, but I will try out another one either today or towmarrow and post back with results. Thanks for the reply!

-Mark

[Ching_F.]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the update.  Please let me know if using a new USB stick works.  In the meantime, I'm still trying to do some research on my end.  I'll let you know if I get any new updates.

[weizbox]

Still no luck. I've tried 3 hard drives, 2 floppy drives, and 2 computers. I've formatted the drives so many differnt times and ways with the partition being logical and primay, and setting that partition to active or not.

I did manage to find this post that talked about the many bugs in the installer:
http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=133028&query.id=527257#M133028


So, I'm going to try that out, and see what I can do about zeroing out the MBR, and what software to use. I'll port back if I have any luck.... but either way this isntaller is certainly not like the other NI software I have used before.. it needs a ton of help. The install uses a floppy, when a day of work could turn it into a CD along with proper formatting tools, so I'm not sure why they tried to make this even more complicated and tedious than it needed to be. As well, the documentaiton specific NOTHING about the way the drive should be formatted, other than it be made as a FAT32, which clearly isn't the only thing that needs to be done. Already we have spent way too many hours trying to get this thing up and running and it has in turn slowed are development down considerably. I would have to strongly reccomend that no one try to turn a desktop computer into a RT target unless they know a good deal about hard drives, and have plenty of time to spend trying to debug a situation that should have been delt with prior to the release.

[MSATLAB]

Hello,

      I have been having the same problem here.  I can get it to boot with the floppy but not the hard drive.  I feel like I have tried everything.  Weizbox is right on the aspect of making this difficult.  I am on my 5rd day of figuring this problem out and I am still not finding my answer.  If someone with any knowlodge could please help us out that would be great!  Also, why did they go from floppy to usb? What happened to the years of CD's? 

Michael

[RDR]

Hello Michael,

I would recommend taking a look at this KnowledgeBase entry regarding the system requirements for using a desktop PC as a Real-Time target:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/440BAF128AA75F95862572580081EB3D?OpenDocument

This article also documents the installation and setup instructions.  Let me know if this still leaves you with any unanswered questions and I will try to answer them.

-Bob

[PatC]

This sounds alot like a problem I encountered once. I set up Labview RT (8.0 in this case) on a hard drive. The installation appeared to work fine and it would boot from a floppy, but it refused to boot from the harddrive. The problem turned out to be that the RT install program had not properly activated the boot partition on the harddrive. I was able to fix it by manually activating the partition and it worked fine after that.

My Suggestion:
Get a DOS bootdisk (www.bootdisk.com has some downloadable images, FreeDOS will work too)
Boot into DOS and run FDISK
In FDISK, select the option to activate the Primary Partition
Reboot from the harddrive and it should work.

Hope this helps.

Patrick

[MSATLAB]

We have actually figured it out, after many long days.  You just install the RTOS like Labview says and make sure it is the first partition.  Whether that is on another hard drive that is the master or if it is actually the first partition of the drive.  We had two seperate drives and we were running Windows as the Master and the Labview RTOS as the slave.  When we switched them it worked.  Also, doing a long format (Not Quick Format) also fixed the situation.  For a bootloader we are using GAG, THE GRAPHICAL BOOT MANAGER which can be found for free on google.  Thank you for your help.

Michael

[weizbox]

Hi Michael,

Thank you very much for mentioning GAG. I think I will try to use that in order to get one of our IDE Flash Drives to work since we've never been able to get RT on there. I've even tried cloning our standard IDE HD to the flash and it would not boot. I'll post an update when I have a chance to try it out, but for now I'm focused more on the RT programming since we have a drive that works.


For any of the NI people, is there a reason why a IDE Flash Drive would not work? It's a standard IDE interface, and I've had no trouble getting Windows XP and Linux installed on it... so I'm not sure what the problem would be, other than the obvious need for a better RTOS installer.