Why can't Labview RT find the primary network device after upgrade from 7.1 to 8.2.1?

[Pete_Culmer]

Hi,

I've recently upgraded a desktop PC target from Labview ETS Realtime 7.1 to the version shipping with Labview 8.2.1

Before the upgrade the system worked perfectly - the network card was detected and control applications worked as expected...

I have installed the Pharlap ETS base system via floppy disk and the process reported no errors. However, when booted from hard disk I get the error, 'cannot find primary network device - rebooting in 10s'

This is using the exact same system and BIOS configuration so I'm struggling to work out what is going wrong. The system specs are:

Asus P5P800 SE m/b, P4 3 Ghz CPU, 512Mb ram, Intel Pro 100/s NIC

I have two NI M-series cards installed - should these be removed? Does the PCI slot that the NIC is installed in matter?

Thanks in advance for any light shed on this,

Pete

[rsw]

Hi Pete,

The following link shows ethernet card support, I know this was working under 7.1 but can you still verify that the hardware is supported please

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

Also, are you using the latest BIOS updates for your motherboard?

Thanks,

[Pete_Culmer]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the reply.

I've installed the latest motherboard bios updates, this hasn't changed anything.

I've taken the network card out to double check the chipset, its definitely labeled as a Intel Pro/100 S and has a 82551QM chipset. The requirements spec you linked to specifies that 82551 chipsets are supported, I presume that the 82551QM is included within this?

What are the NIC's supplied by NI with the ETS licenses?

Cheers,

Pete

[Pete_Culmer]

Hi,

An update to my previous post.

I have since been to buy a new Intel Pro/100 S card that has an 82550 chipset on it. This doesn't work either, again resulting in the 'cannot find primary network device - rebooting in 10s' error.

Also - intermittently the boot error changes to 'cannot start basic services' and the system is halted. I have tried the NIC in different PCI slots, and with and without PnP enabled in the bios, all to no avail.

Could this be a problem in the installed ETS - I wonder if the upgrade from Labview 7.1 -> 8.2.1 has caused problems in the ETS image?

Pete

[rsw]

Hi Pete,

Sorry for the late reply, your chipset on your first card should be supported fine. I'm not coming across any issues with the upgrade, but is it possible for you to do a clean install of this on your system for 8.2 ?

Thanks,

[Pete_Culmer]

Ok, tried a clean install of Labview 8.2.1 + RT toolkit. The `format hard drive' floppy disk that this creates again installs the base system without any errors reported. However, on reboot the same error messages as above are seen.

However, I have since found a solution. Creating a safe mode floppy disk and booting from this is successful and identifies my network card. I could then connect via MAX, configure and install Labview components. Strange.

I think the problem may lie in the safemode.exe that is placed on the `format hard drive' floppy disk. This differs in size to the one (that works) on the safemode floppy disk:

Format hard drive disk: safemode.exe = 876kb (898,032 bytes)
Safe mode disk: safemode.exe = 821kb (841,168 bytes)

Hopefully this workaround might help somebody else - took me ages to find it....!

Pete

[Texas_Diaz]

I have spent a little time looking into this problem, and here's what I found:

1.  The 8.2.1 format disk is approximately 96% full, whereas the safemode disk is approximately 75% full.  Not sure if that makes any difference, but it might with the next bits of information.

2.  If I copy the safemode.exe from the format disk to the safemode disk, the safemode disk still works just fine (and, to be honest with you, they're the same file). 

3.  I formatted a PC desktop with the format disk, which copies safemode.exe to the hard disk.  I then booted the system with a safemode disk, and FTP'd the safemode.exe on the target over to my host computer.  When I perform a diff of the safemode.exe that is copied to the target and the safemode.exe on the format floppy disk, the last several kilobytes of the file from the target is absolute junk.

Inside of safemode.exe is a compressed file system containing all of the RT Ethernet drivers (along with other files and settings necessary to boot a target, basically everything within ni-rt/system/... on an installed target) and if that compressed file system image gets corrupted then the system cannot mount the compressed file system.  In cases like this, it's like deleting the ethernet drivers from a running system - when you reboot you immediately get the, "Unable to find primary ethernet device" message because it cannot load any of the ethernet drivers to actually determine if there are any ethernet cards in the system. 

While playing around, I found that I have around a 50% likelihood of running into this if I load the disk to 90% plus capacity - the problem occurs in different files (judging from the diffs of the written files) depending on how they're written to disk, which might point out a problem with caching in the floppy disk filesystem manager.  I say only the floppy disk because I have yet to reproduce this with 16 and 32 bit FAT systems, but the problem is very reproducible with the 12 bit floppy filesystems. 

We will investigate this issue further, thanks so much for bringing this to our attention!

-Danny

[Falko Vogler]

Hello,

I am lifting this thread as I have a similar problem on my system.

I have a desktop PC which I want to use as RT-target using LabView 8.5. It uses the following components:Intel dual core processor on Asus P5K mainboard, Intel 82541PI ethernet card (just to name the most important). I am using a floppy disc for the installation as I can not get the USB drive working.

Having formatted the hdd with the format-disc tool from MAX Explorer, the PC will not boot. Neither Boot disc or Safe mode disc will boot the system.

The Real-Time validation tool will give the prompt: Error! no supported network devices found. I have tried different network cards and installed the latest BIOS version as well as tried all the BIOS settings I could think of.

I have also found out, that there are two different file sizes of the safemode.exe...

Any suggestions?

Falko

[Texas_Diaz]

Aha!  Intel 82541PI support didn't make it into the Intel Gigabit driver in 8.5.0 because of a snafoo in documentation and because we didn't have one to test with here at NI.  Do you have any other supported chipsets you can use?

-Danny