"new hardware found" on every re-boot?

[Chris_R.]

Hi Les,

Please tell me a little more about your hardware setup.  What GPIB hardware do you have?  Is it a PCMCIA-GPIB card?  What hardware do you have in your chassis?  Also, what driver versions (NI-488.2, NI-VISA) do you have installed?

[Les__Bartel]

I'm using the CardBus StarFabric Interface to talk to the PXI chassis.  The GPIB card (in the PXI chassis) is talking to several HP power supplies.  The chassis also contains a 6624 which I may not use, a 2527 Mux, two 2565 relays and a 4071 DMM.  GPIB is the only card whose driver sometimes needs to be installed.  VISA version 3.4.1, NI488.2 version 2.42.

[fivestar]

Hi Les-

I think the key for you is the temporary absence of the chassis with the GPIB card.  When you power on your laptop without the chassis present, the operating system clears out a lot of the data associated with that hardware, and NI-488.2 does some additional cleanup, especially if you use a GPIB program or connect a different GPIB interface while the other one is not connected.  When the chassis gets reconnected, the operating system has to run the Found New Hardware Wizard again in order to associate this "new" hardware with the NI-488.2 driver.

The Found New Hardware Wizard appears when hardware is detected but doesn't already have information in the registry.  If you run regedit and look at the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI (or USB)

you can see if there is hardware information present or not.  You can even periodically refresh your view to see if a particular action causes that information to be cleared out.  I'm sure you've heard this before, but don't edit anything in the registry, as it could cause serious problems.

-Dan

[Les__Bartel]

So there's nothing you or I can do about this?