Trenton’s Technical Support Department was reminded how time marches on the other day by a customer whose Windows NT 4.0 installation kept failing at the same point early in the process.
Trenton NLT Single Board Computer
We duplicated the failure, as reported on the NLT single board computer, and also found that exact same failure occurred using the SLT single board computer as well.
One of the dilemmas when investigating problems with operating systems over 13 years old is getting support from the manufacturer. Even Microsoft eventually drops technical support for mature products and we’re left with only our dusty archives to navigate to the 20th century when Windows NT was leading edge technology.
This is a good time to mention that Windows NT was released in 1996, about eight years before the NLT’s PICMG 1.3 specification was even drafted in 2004. So we opened up the first line of defense that we have whenever an unexplained situation rears its disconcerting head: We hit the DEL key during POST and entered the BIOS Setup Utility. Then we stepped over to the Advanced -> CPU Configuration Menu and discovered something interesting almost immediately.
The second choice on that menu was called “Max CPUID Value Limit” and it was defaulted to Disabled.
Our BIOS vendor, American Megatrends. provided a helpful hint with the Max CPUID Value Limit setting which read: “This should be enabled in order to boot legacy OSes that cannot support CPUs with extended CPUID functions.”
Seeing “Legacy OSes” we enabled this setting and pressed the F10 key to save the settings and exit. Then we retried the Windows NT install and Bingo, the process got past the previous failure and the installation continued. Eventually, Windows NT was installed and running. We gladly informed our customer how to get past the problem and said a prayer of thanks for AMI’s helpful BIOS hints.
Then we had occasion to successfully install both Windows XP and newly-released, days-old Windows 7 on the very same NLT system within hours of the years-old Windows NT installation. And believe it or not, the Windows 7 installation probably took about half the time the Windows NT install required. But it’s just all in a day’s work for the Trenton workhorse NLT.
The moral of the story, there’s no substitute for customer service, and when it comes to operating system knowledge in the world of embedded computing, nobody beats Trenton!
