LabVIEW and Windows can eat up a lot of space, so you may find yourself stretching your hard drives thin and having to consider swapping in a new (and bigger) hard drive, or simply adding another hard drive to the mix. Let’s consider some options.

Starting Afresh

As much of a headache as re-installing Windows and LabVIEW sounds, it is the only way to ensure the operating system and LabVIEW play nice. You risk losing some of your configurations, but at least you can rely on documentation and know your order of operations were done correctly. Start with Windows.

1. If you have a Windows installation disk, pop it in and start installing it onto the new drive. Skip to #6.
2. If not, Google “Windows 7 ISO” and download an ISO file of your intended Windows installation.
3. Download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool and use it with a USB key to create a bootable version of Windows 7 with the ISO file.
4. Restart your computer. Most computers will attempt to boot from a USB drive before anything else, but to makes sure, press F7 when starting your computer (or whichever key takes you to the boot menu) and select the USB drive.
5. Proceed with the Windows installation on the new hard drive.
6. You should still have access to the old hard drive, so at this point you can just drag over files you still need (don’t drag over programs, just re-install them).

Once Windows is installed you may choose to download LabVIEW or use installation disks. If you have disks, you should use them, and LabVIEW will provide updates once you are complete in case the disks are out of date. See below for more on this.

Merging onto a New Hard Drive

If you want to retain you Windows installation and all your files you will want to “clone” the old hard drive to the new one. There are plenty of paid-for solutions, but this is the free way.

Factory Windows installations usually partition a hard drive with a separate area (and disk letter) called “SYSTEM” which makes the drive bootable. Without this, the hard drive is just data and doesn’t represent a bootable operating system. If you choose to maintain the “SYSTEM” partition on the new hard drive, it needs to be the first partition, and you should use the Windows partition manager to format and create this partition before cloning.

1. Download XXCLONE.
2. If you are maintaining a boot partition (explained above), first clone that partition, using the “SYSTEM” partition as the source, and the new “SYSTEM” partition as the destination.
   
3. Next, clone the primary partition of the old hard drive to the primary partition of the new hard drive (this is all the data that includes Windows, documents, etc.).
4. If you are not using a boot partition, you will need to make sure your single partitioned hard drive is recognized as a bootable operating system. Download the free version of EasyBCD and use it’s “BCD Backup and Restore” tool on the new hard drive to create the proper files needed for booting. (XXCLONE offers something like this in their Tools but it didn’t work for me).
5. Upon restarting your computer—making sure to boot from the new hard drive—you should be back in action, loading Windows as if nothing had changed.

Using Two Hard Drives

It is not ideal to use two hard drives to split the storage of program-specific files (like .exe files, or different LabVIEW components). The reason is that someday you may need to consolidate physical hardware space, and need to merge into one larger drive, but more importantly, the best reason to stay away from this is because you will start creating references across hard drives. If the supplemental hard drive fails, or the drive letter gets changed, your programs (including LabVIEW) start breaking. If you insist on using two (or more) drives, the best suggestion is to make sure one drive is for all operating system related files, and use the others for document and file storage.

LabVIEW 32-bit & 64-bit Order of Operations with FPGA Card and Basler Camera

The reason it can be a pain to move LabVIEW stuff around (especially .exe’s) is because LabVIEW’s NI MAX keeps record of the installation locations for all NI components. LabVIEW use’s the references inside of NI MAX to decide where to open the things it needs. This is why it can be easier to just re-install everything when shit hits the fan.

For re-installing LabVIEW with an FPGA card and Vision hardware (connected to a Basler camera) follow this order. This is specifically for users who have the installation discs.

1. Make sure all the NI software is removed (use Window’s “uninstall a program” tool).
2. Make sure all hardware cards are removed. If they are not, shut down the computer, unplug it, and remove the cards (set them on an anti-static bag). Plug the computer back in and start it.
3. Insert the first LabVIEW discs and install LabVIEW (this will be the 32-bit version) and the FPGA module. You will also want to make sure that Xilinx compiling tools are installed along with this. When it prompts you for Drivers you will want to continue the installation without driver support—these will be installed when installing 64-bit LabVIEW.
4. After the installation it will prompt you for a restart (don’t do anything with the hardware yet).
5. Download LabVIEW 64-bit and begin the installation. When prompted for the location of the Drivers, place the driver CD into the computer and browse to the location in the NI prompt. You will want to select all of the Vision drivers in the next dialog.
6. After the 64-bit installation you will need to restart the computer. Once you have done this, NI will check for updates. If there are any, download them (and restart the computer) before moving on.
7. Once everything is installed, shutdown the computer, unplug the power cord, and install the FPGA and Vision hardware. Plug the power back in and start the computer.

The FPGA hardware should show up in NI MAX now (also see Getting Started with the R-Series Multifunction RIO and Getting Started with the NI PCIe-1433). If you were using a RTSI line between the FPGA and Vision hardware, be sure to re-install it in NI MAX.

1. Open NI MAX.
2. Right-click “Devices and Interfaces” and click “Create New…”.
3. Choose “NI-RTSI Cable”.
4. Locate the camera under “Devices and Interfaces” now and modify the RTSI Lines in the “Camera Attributes” tab.

It is also worth ensuring the camera attributes from your original projects is the same (for instance, we leave “Enable Serial Commands” unchecked). You now want to make sure the FPGA hardware is a use-able target in a LabVIEW project.

1. Open a blank LabVIEW project.
2. Right-click “My Computer” within the project and under “New” make sure you see “Target and Devices”. If it is available, click it.
3. Now make sure your FPGA device can be added to the project.

If you fail to get through these 3 steps, you will want to review the installation procedure, and your best option may be to re-install everything with particular attention paid to the order of operations. It is worth either recompiling your FPGA VI’s or at least opening the “FPGA Compile Worker” in Windows (find it by searching or under the National Instruments folder) and making sure the compiler is installed correctly.