Configure a Real Time Desktop PC

[BruceAmmons]

A few years ago, I had some problems converting PCs to RT systems.  They were very quirky.  After a while, I realized the hard drives had to be formatted to a limited size.  I believe they had to be less than 8 GB, FAT 16.  Once I reformatted, everything worked fine.  I don't know if this size limitation has been corrected in the last 5+ years, but it could still be an issue.

Bruce

[ahpd]

Dear Friends,

I tested all your suggestions. I changed IP but it wasn't the issue, Anyway because I can connect so easy in Safe Mode, I don't think the problem is IP.

- Guys, In Safe Mode message : " Initializing network..." appears on RT Target screen but it does not appear in Run Mode. Is it OK? I Uploaded Screen Shot of Run Mode previously ( Pic 3 ) and here is an Screen Shot of Safe Mode. If it's not OK, What should I do?

- I also Uploaded the list of Softwares which I install, There is not RTOS in my list, I think "LabVIEW Real Time" Software tree will install the RTOS. Is that true?

Would you do me a favor and check my uploaded Pictures please. Thanks a lot my Friends.

[Texas_Diaz]

Your Pic 3 shows, as you said, no "Initializing Network..." message.  This means something is hanging during boot preventing the networking subsystem from loading and thus it won't be seen in MAX.  This, at least, gives us a partial picture of what's going on.

I'm interested/concerned about the problem you're seeing in Pic 4 - this might be the cause of all the problems you're having.  If the software didn't fully get installed because of some problem, this could partially cause the hang you're seeing.  The error you're seeing (due to password issues) is generally only seen when you change the FTP password (by locking the system via MAX), or changing the system's Administrator password from within MAX or Web Services.  Assuming you didn't do either of those the problem may be with erroneously reading information on the disk, making the system think you did one of those things.  There are a couple possible scenarios:

1. Your disk may have bad sectors that are being used.  RT's format and partitioning mechanisms do not check for bad sectors nor can it mark bad sectors.  You will need to use a DOS utility on the drive to check for bad sectors and mark them as unusable.  I personally like using FreeDOS, and you can create a USB Bootable FreeDOS thumbdrive.
2. The disk partition may have become partially corrupt.  Boot off the USB RT PC Desktop Utilities thumbdrive, select Option 6 "Format Options", and select Option 2 to wipe out all partition information on the disk and create a single partition.  Select a Reliance partition in the next menu.  Once formatted, remove the USB thumbdrive from the system and reboot the computer.  Keep the thumbdrive in your pocket (or in a desk drawer) from that point on.  When the system reboots, it should boot into Safe Mode from the hard drive and then you can install software. (Reliance was chosen because the reliance formatter does a better job of checking for disk irregularities than the FAT formatter.  Reliance is also a better filesystem for insulating other files when there's a problem with file instability (because of power-off situations).  However, you cannot read a Reliance partition using Windows or DOS so be aware of this.
3. Your hard drive may not be set up as Primary Master - your disk must be set up as a Primary Master boot drive.

The boot mechanisms used to boot Safe Mode from the USB thumbdrive and booting Safe Mode or RT off the hard disk are two completely different animals, and must be treated as such.  Hopefully we can get rid of the error you're seeing in MAX so we can be assured the installation on the disk is good.

Something else to try is to enable debug printing of the network initialization.  We actually initialize the network devices prior to printing out the "Initializing Network..." message, and it's possible that the network drivers on your USB thumbdrive are newer than the ones being installed onto the hard disk for run mode.  Boot up into Safe Mode on your USB thumbdrive and FTP to the target and modify the ni-rt.ini file to include the following lines at the END of the file:

[Debug]

TraceEthernetDriverLoading=TRUE

This will cause prints to show the ethernet driver load status.  Take a picture of where the hang occurs, if anything changes.

This is all I have for now.  Let's see if any of these give us something we can use.

-Danny

[Taylor.Kendall]

Some other things that sometimes help random RT bugs.  

• Disable onboard Ethernet in the BIOS if your onboard Ethernet is not supported by LVRTOS.  
• Make sure that that SATA settings show "compatibility" mode 
• Disable legacy USB in the BIOS

[ahpd]

Dear Danny,

I tried all things you said and still have the wired problem. I checked my HDD for bad sectors, no bad sectors found. I even changed the HDD two times, nothing changed. I also checked the Primary Master thing.

I formatted HDD many times using USB thumbdrive, every time after rebooting it automatically goes to Safe Mode ( Pic 5 ).

And I modified ni-rt.ini after rebooting, Pic 6 appeared and it stays that way. My Ethernet chip is Intel 82540EM Gigabit Controller.

Also I checked opinions in other posts.

Do you have any idea? Thanks. 

[Texas_Diaz]

Oh, that's very interesting indeed.  We are getting much closer to identifying the real problem here.

Pic 6 shows me that the boot process is indeed hanging in the network driver initialization phase.  During this phase we attempt to detect all the network devices that the driver recognizes/supports.  What we do is interrogate each device, read its MAC address from the onboard flash memory, determine connected PHY hardware, and so on.  It appears that some simple initialization of the device (which is required to be able to interrogate the device) is causing the process to hang.  This is usually when we have to poll on wonky status bits in the hardware, if the polling doesn't have some kind of timer watchdog or similar and the hardware decides to ignore our request command (sorry, I probably got too technical there).

Fear not, though, I updated the network drivers last release to handle this case better.  You want to download the usb_utilities_and_drivers.zip file available either on that link or from the Desktop RT PC white paper available here on ni.com.  That package contains the latest LV RT 2011SP1 USB thumbdrive creator AND the latest Intel network drivers for almost any version of RT (from LV RT 2012 back to LV RT 7.1.1).  Once you've downloaded the ZIP, and extracted the entire contents into a folder on your hard disk, you'll find MSI installers for the Intel1000ei driver and Intel8254xi driver - double-click on the intel8254xi.msi and intel1000e.msi files to install (you may need Admin permissions to do this).  For the Intel 82540EM, you want to be sure to install the intel8254xi.msi.  Once installed on your host, boot the RT system into Safe Mode using the USB Flash Drive and go back to MAX and reinstall both Intel gigabit drivers onto your RT system - you may see an icon difference showing you have a newer version of the drivers on your PC than you do on your RT system.  

Please try this, and let me know how it goes.  These two driver updates are what shipped with LV RT 2012.

-Danny

[ahpd]

This is becoming so impossible!

I updated two drivers to RT System and tried again but nothing changed! Display is showing exactly like Pic 6.

I also replaced the Ethernet card with the Intel 82550EY one. Pic 7 appeared. I used a Router with DHCP instead of direct Cross Over cable, still no result.

It connects easily in Safe Mode!! And Pic 8 is Safe Mode display with extra info that comes after editing ni-rt.ini.

I don't know why it bothers this much!

What can I do now Danny?

[Texas_Diaz]

If it's any consolation, I have absolutely no idea what's going on either (though I can see how that's possibly not much consolation).  This is one of the big reasons why generic desktops are a real joy to work with, there are so many variables it takes a company like Microsoft to manage them.  

How much memory do you have in the system?  Is it possible to lower the memory to 2GB or less just to see if that will make a difference?  The C runtime (MSVC) treats memory allocations differently based on the "mode" you're running in (Safe Mode, Run Mode, SMP Mode, ...) which may explain the differences in run mode.  

-Danny

[ahpd · Accepted solution]

I just changed the whole PC. Problem Solved!

[Thør]

To others who have experienced this "the password you typed was incorrect" problem, I figured out a solution that doesn't involve scrapping the whole PC.  For me this problem stemmed from someone changing the PC's TEMP directory to an invalid path.  Try editing your account's TEMP (and perhaps TMP) environment variables back to the default, which is "C:\users\*you*\AppData\Local\Temp"