I spent some time this week trying to install the checked version of Windows XP on my compact PCI Pentium M system that is the A model for our latest and greatest data recorder. This should have been easy as I just wanted to test a driver I was developing and the normal versions of both XP Professional and Embedded XP work perfectly. Of course nothing is easy and setup would get as far as the “Loading NTFS” part of the text mode section of the setup and then reboot the machine. After trying the obvious things I admitted defeat and asked somebody who knows lots about these things and apparently the version of the Pentium M we use (Banias)has a slight problem when used in conjunction with an 855GME chipset in that there is an incompatibility that stops the checked version of Windows from running. Apparently neither Intel or Microsoft seem to want to admit it’s their problem and it doesn’t seem that there is a workaround that will let me run the checked copy of the OS as I want.
At least remote debugging of the OS is built into XP professional too. A few switches in boot.ini and you can still attach something like WinDbg. Well it’s better than nothing. Ironically our final hardware version which was waiting on my desk when I got in the next day managed to implement most of the functionality we needed without needing a special driver because it interacted with the default behaviour of Windows much better than we could ever have hoped for. Typical.
