PCMCIA-GPIB card appears as UNKNOWN_MANUFACTURER, not recognised in automation explorer

[Kevin Wood]

Hi There,

I have a laptop which was working fine with a PCMCIA-GPIB card but it is now failing to recognise the card. The interface does not appear in the measurement and automation explorer and is identified in Windows device manager as "PCMCIA UNKNOWN_MANUFACTURER". Windows can't locate the driver for it.

I have tried re-installing the NI drivers (version 2.40 and 2.50) several times. One time it did pick up the card briefly but the above problem re-appeared. Now I can't get it to recognise the card whatever I do.

The system is running Windows XP Pro. SP2. I have tried with two PCMCIA-GPIB cards and both behave the same. Both cards work in another system with no problems.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Best Regards

Kevin Wood

[JamesC]

Hi Kevin,

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but it sounds as if there is a major software issue on your laptop. Did you install anything recently onto the laptop, software updates or driver updates. We have even seen an issue in the UK office where the recent Microsoft update has causes issues with our driver software.

I would suggest either running system restore to get you back to a point before the update, or to uninstall all NI software on your laptop and then call the UK office 01635 523545 and quote SR number 563076 to talk to someone in technical support and request the program msiBlast, to finish cleaning out your system Finally you could bite the bullet and do a full windows reinstall on your laptop, depending on the amount of NI software you have sometimes it is quicker to reinstall windows if all you important files are kept on a network and you have access to reinstall Windows yourself rather then an IT department.

Unfortunately this is all I can think of that could be wrong with your system, as we know the hardware works in another machine, and we know of at least 2 hardware cards that don't work in the suspect machine.

Regards
JamesC
NIUK and Ireland

[Kevin Wood]

Hi James,

Many thanks for your help. I suspected that it was something odd on that machine as PNP is clearly not recognising the card but wondered if anyone had seen it before.

Nothing I can think of has been changed recently on the machine (other than windows updates!).

I will take the steps you recommend and see if I can get it back running.

Thanks again,

Kevin