Dual Boot WinXP and RT on a PXI 8176

[mikepxi]

Hi,

I've WinXP installed on a PXI-8176. Normally the Controller boots WinXP and if i want to start Labview RT I have to insert a boot-disk.
is there a way to boot RT without a disk AND to keep WinXP (sort of a dual boot)?

would be convinient...

thx i.a. and best regards,
mike

[Andre_Saller]

This is not possible. Only later PXI-Controller (818x, 819x,...) can be booted into the realtime OS via BIOS settings. The older series has to use the bootdisk.

[M.haefner]

I absolutely disagree with Andre. You CAN have a 2nd OS on your system and switch between them. Even on desktop systems. I just did it. All you need is a bootmager (I used XOSL1.1.5 - it's free). Create 4 primary partions.
1. Set the 1st primary primary partion as active and install ETS - mine is about 250mb FAT32
2. Set the 3rd primary primary partion as active and install Windows - Size doesn't seem to matter
3. install XOSL onto the 2nd primary
4. The 4th primary is free for logical drives

You HAVE to install ETS onto the 1st primary. Otherwise ETS does not boot (at least in my case).
If you install Windows after XOSL, Windows will modify the MBR so it starts directly. You can reinstall XOSL then and everything works fine again.
I hope I could help with that.

Regards,
Matthias

[KittF]

Notice the Andre says that you cannot dual boot using the BIOS settings, which I believe is correct.  The newer controllers have a LabVIEW RT selection that boots the system.  I believe it boots to the same partition where both the RTOS and Windows are installed, which must be FAT32.  The newer controllers also will boot to RT safemode, using an minimal (i.e. few drivers - video and network) RTOS in ROM versus the RTOS on the hard drive (Very useful if RT software is not yet installed since it can then be a target from a Windows machine). 

Needless to say, I think Matthias has the best solution for the PXI-8176.  In this case, you are using a boot manager to point to a different Windows partition when booting to XP.  The primary partition is the RTOS. There are sites that tell how to modify the BOOT.ini file in order to have Windows boot from different partitions.  It is not too hard to have a menu presented to the user at boot.