PanelView Suddenly Won't Boot

PanelView Plus 7 Perf 1000, v.11
Guardlogix 5380 v.32

This HMI has been running fine for months and suddenly last night it would not boot after maintenance cycled power to correct a communication issue between the PLC and the safety I/O.

The HMI would hang during boot, usually at "loading alarms" but not always.

We replaced the HMI with a brand new one and it behaved exactly the same way.

We finally got it to boot by unplugging the ethernet cable and cycling power. Once it booted up we plugged it back in but there were a lot of communication errors in the diagnostics window although it seems to run fine now. What I mean is that there are errors but it "works".

There are 6 PLC targets in the run-time comms setup in FT ViewStudio. There is no other junk in there, just the targets.

I don't believe in coincidences, so the fact that this started with a mysterious comms drop must mean something but I'm not sure what. At the very least I need to test/replace my ethernet cable from the HMI to the switch, but I still don't understand what I'm seeing. Why would it boot when disconnected from the network?

Has anyone seen anything like this?

B.

First you could try resetting the panel to factory defaults following the TechConnect noted below.
Just be sure you have a backup of the runtime .mer file to reload after factory reset.

731991 - PanelView Plus 7: Maintenance Mode Operations

624533 - Resetting a PanelView Plus 7 to Factory Default

If you do not have RA access to TechConnect, the procedure is connect a USB keyboard to your PanelView and reboot panel while holding the "F1" key. When rebooted you will have a few option listed: Safe Mode, Clear all data, Factory defaults.

Thanks Kuul, but I would assume that the new PV I installed was reset....we had to configure the password, challenge question, and network settings, so I'm not sure this will help me.

scarince,

I'm having the same problem with a Panelview 1000. We replaced the panelview and same problem. Please let me know if you found a solution for this problem.

Thanks,

Any chance there was online creation/editing of a udt recently? Failing to load/communication errors following a power cycle combined with v32 makes me think of this, which I have run into a couple times.

stephenestacey said:

scarince,

Please let me know if you found a solution for this problem.

Click to expand...

Yes, I think we did. For us it was exactly what plvlce linked to. We solved it by flashing all of the PLC's up to v33 and it finally stoppped.

Good luck!

Thanks

We upgraded to v33 at the beginning of the year. I'm guessing that's when the problem with the HMI started. I was just now told about the issue.

I ended up updating the PV firmware to v11 from v7 and the problem went away.

That's interesting. As I recall, we were at v9 in the HMI's and v31 in the PLC. We had no problems until we went to v32 in the PLC. Then we moved the HMI's to v11, but had no improvement until v33 came out for the PLC's.

We talked to our distributors tech team about it and never really got an answer for the root cause.

scarince said:

That's interesting. As I recall, we were at v9 in the HMI's and v31 in the PLC. We had no problems until we went to v32 in the PLC. Then we moved the HMI's to v11, but had no improvement until v33 came out for the PLC's.

We talked to our distributors tech team about it and never really got an answer for the root cause.

Click to expand...

Double checked and it is v32. We've been upgrading our PLCs and I loose track of which machine has what version.