National Instruments MXI Series - Manual (Page 16)

Chapter 2 Hardware Installation
© National Instruments Corporation 2-5 NI ExpressCard MXI Series User Manual
Notes For more information about cables, refer to the NI ExpressCard MXI Cable Options
section of Chapter 3, Hardware Overview .
You cannot use two NI PXI-8360 or NI PXIe-8360 boards for chassis expansion as with
MXI-4. You can connect only an NI PCIe-8361/8362 or an NI ExpressCard-8360 host
device to an NI PXI-8360 or NI PXIe-8360.
Powering Up the NI ExpressCard MXI System
To power up the NI ExpressCard MXI system, follow these steps:
1. Power on the expansion chassis.
2. Power on the host.
Typical PCI-PCI bridges are used to add PCI devices to a PCI hierarchy in
which all the bridges and devices are contained within a single chassis.
Because of this, BIOSes and operating systems make the assumption that
all PCI devices in the entire hierarchy will be available as soon as code
execution begins at power-up. This assumption means that all of the
expansion chassis must be turned on before the host PC for the BIOS and
OS to correctly configure an NI ExpressCard MXI system.
Note You may add additional chassis using MXI-3 or MXI-4. When using MXI-4, there
are no restrictions on chassis power-on order, except that the host must be powered on last.
When using MXI-3, you must power up the chassis in order, beginning furthest from the
host and ending with the host. Refer to the MXI-3 or MXI-4 documentation for further
details.
Powering Down the NI ExpressCard MXI System
Because operating systems and drivers commonly make the assumption
that PCI devices will be present in the system from power-up to
power-down, it is important not to power off the expansion chassis until
after the host PC is powered off. Powering off the expansion chassis while
the host is still on can cause crashes or hangs. The order in which expansion
chassis are powered off, relative to each other, is not important.