Jim,
We spoke yesterday over the phone. It seems a part of your controller is damaged, so the best solution would be to send your controller for repair. The error message that you are getting does not really point us to any specific part of your controller.
If you thing this could be the hard-drive, you could try installing another hard-drive into your PXI-8176 controller. We have only tested our controller with FUJITSU hard-drives, but theorically you can use any 2.5" laptop hard-drive, not thicker than 9.5mm.
Feel free to call me using the Service Request you created through http://www.ni.com/ask. Call me using the phone number 1-866-ASK-MYNI (1-866-275-6964). Your service request is already under my name, so when you call and use it, you will get my extensio
n.
Hope to hear soon from you,
Claudia Lorente
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/ask