GPIB cards not showing up in labview/max

[labstew]

On two of my testing computers the GPIB cards just stopped working, that is ...they don t show up in labview anymore, and they will not communicate with anything sent through or to them (they had a program that comes with them to send simple commands like *rst etc) They don t show up in MAX, but they are nt NI cards (I read on other posts that only NI cards show up in MAX can anyone confirm this?).  I have tried re installing them and it does nt help.  In windows hardware management I get the "this device is working properly" message.  I know this is a pretty general question but does anyone have any troubleshooting ideas? it seems strange that two cards on seperate computers just stop working at the same time.

Thanks,

Andrew

[Dennis_Knutson]

What do you mean by 'show up in LabVIEW'? What kind of indication did LabVIEW ever give that they were present?

And no, in most cases, a non-NI GPIB board will not show up in MAX. However, if you are using an Agilent board (for example) and correctly install it's version of VISA and set the tulip passport, then it will. What is the make and model of GPIB board? Frankly, it sounds to me like both of the pc's might have gotten some sort of update that you are not aware of.

[labstew]

when you create a ViSA constant it gives you a list of all availible devices to assign it to,  when the card is working it shows all the GPIB devices.  when it is nt you just see the comm and serial ports. 

I think I narrowed it down to hardware....I fixed one of the computers by moving the GPIB card to a different PCI slot and re installing it, the other one might be a motherboard fault (one of the techs told me the computer was "acting funny" since a power surge a few weeks ago, would have been good to know this at the start :P) 

Andrew

[xseadog]

Hi

try going back to basics
Now that you have succeeded in one PC working try swopping the GPIB cards. Thus if it works then the problem is with the last PC ( could be hardware or software).

As you mentioned in your post, regarding power surges etc, possible that hard disk sustained corruption such that application software (dll etc) damaged. Try re installing software, worst case
you have to delete all NI software and reload.

Thats when a deployment package comes in handy

Xseadog