Shogun failing to BOOT / hanging on the 10th of each month with Windows NT

Failure Symptom:

Either Windows NT fails to boot after displaying "OS loader v3.51”, or a currently running Windows NT system will hang. This symptom will only happen on the 10th of the month. After rebooting the system it will work properly until the 10th of the next month.

Root Cause:

Incorrectly supplier initialised registers in the Dallas 1587 real time clock cause problems with Shogun products running Windows NT.

Testview (an Intel diagnostic used to test the motherboard) initialises the alarm registers in the Dallas Real Time Clock improperly which results in an alarm interrupt causing the system to hang because Windows NT can not handle the interrupt.

There are 4 alarm registers of which 3 of them correspond to time, hour minutes seconds, and one is for the day of the month. The four alarm bytes can be used in two ways. First, when a specific time and date is written in the appropriate alarm registers, the alarm interrupt is initiated at the specified time and day of the month. The second use is to have a “don't care” in one or more of the four alarm registers. The RTC monitors the date alarm, hours alarm, minutes alarm, and seconds alarm registers for a match with the current values in the date, hours, minutes, and seconds registers. As a result, a “wake up” will occur when all four alarm registers match the current date/time registers, with “don’t cares” being equated to a match. This means a “don't care” only in the date alarm register will cause an interrupt once a day at the time specified in the time alarm registers. A “don't care” in the date alarm and the hours alarm registers will cause an interrupt every hour that the minutes and seconds alarm registers match the current time. A “don’t care” in the date alarm, hour alarm, minute alarm, and the seconds alarm (everything set to “don’t care”) will cause an interrupt every second.

In this case the alarm was accidentally set to go off on the 10th day of each month.

Corrective Action / Resolution:

A special utility has been developed to properly initialize the real time clock registers. This utility is called RTC.EXE and is available from Apricot Insight BBS AREA 44 in a file called RTC.ZIP.

The utility will correctly set the Real Time Clock after it has been executed and only needs to be run once to permanently correct the problem.

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