RT 9.0 boot and system memory problems

[AnthonV]

Hi, I was wondering if anybody has seen the following behaviour when using RT 9 (2009 Q4 Build Jun 23 2009).  This is on a Quad Dell Desktop with a 320GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM that previously was running RT 8.6 (Build Dec 17 2008) and the utility reports full RT compatiblity.

1) RT 9 cannot boot unassisted (without USB utility disk plugged in) if partition on hard drive is too large.

2) RT 9 cannot deploy as it reports negative amount of RAM available after formatting using a RT 9 USB disk.

1 in more detail):  Using the RT USB utility disk, I formatted the RT desktop's drive to make a clean migration from 8.6 to 9.0.  I chose FAT and for it to use the whole drive as a single partition.  This worked well but the problem was that it did not want to boot without the USB stick after that (always giving the error: "Loading PHARBOOTSYS Could not find OS in root directory", even though pcmon.bin, pharboot.sys and safemode.exe was in the RT root).  If I kept the USB stick plugged in and booted from it, I could upload all the software from MAX to the RT system, but it could still not boot on its own.

I then formatted the drive again using a 8.6 USB utility disk.  This format procedure automatically created a 130 GB partition (not 320GB as with 9.0) and this could boot without the stick.

The next step was to reformat using the RT 9 USB utility disk, but this time I selected FAT and 'Use the first partition' option, which then used the 130GB partition created with the  8.6 disk.  After this it was able to boot.

2 in more detail):  I could not deploy any vi's to this same RT 9 desktop as it seemed to think that the RAM was negative (when checked from the LabVIEW project tree's reference to the target).  In MAX it reported that the system had 3.99TB of RAM (yes TERRA).

The way around this was to reformat using 8.6, and then to download software to it using MAX which had LabVIEW 2009 Q4 installed.  Now I had a RT 9 desktop that reported the correct amount of RAM, and this allowed vi's to be deployed to it.

[dwisti]

This may not help but its worth checking.  Is your hard drive set as a master in BIOS?

[AnthonV]

I wasn't aware that SATA also had a 'Master' setting? But either way, with the same BIOS settings things work fine with 8.6...

[Caseyw]

Hi All,

I wanted to provide some information on these issues and what NI is doing to correct them.

1) RT target FAT formatting: This is a known issue with LabVIEW Real-Time 2009, and has been corrected in LabVIEW 2009 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This service pack can be downloaded at (http://www.ni.com/support/lv2009_sp1.htm).

2) Incorrect RAM reporting above 2 GB: This is an issue that our R&D teams are actively working on. For the time being, a workaround is using 2 GB or less of physical RAM. We expect to be able to support additional RAM shortly.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions, and I apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. I appreciate you posting these issues on the forum; this helps NI gauge the frequency of issues and also spot any that we don't know about so that we can work on correcting them.

Best Regards,

Casey Weltzin

Product Manager, LabVIEW Real-Time

National Instruments