Simatic Drive ES

Make these settings

Now connect to your drive using the path shown below
Pay no attention to my spelling

Hopefully this works for you
Ive done it this way a few hundred times

First of all, thanks guys!! You are legends!! JRW.. Thank you so much!!

Poet --> In my case I was not able to recover from a backup because the previous PC was Windows 2000.. I will not go into the reasons why we were still using a windows 2000 PC as a maintenance PC, but it is what it is and for some things I find it tough to get approvals until it is too late!! Also, I would say 95% of my site is AB.. maybe more... I have two Siemens lines here, but only one S7. The other is S5 which is a whole other nightmare just waiting to become a reality... again!! A few years ago I had a processor crash and I am still trying to recover from that experience!!

With our backups, on our critical plant we run Symantec Livestate which has proven to be effective. I also use Ghost if the PCs are similar and I cannot be bothered digging through the network backups and live data is not critical. It was just not an option for me here to go from Windows 2000 to Win7 64. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the Step 7 software versions and activations. That all went fairly smoothly with a little help from tech support to reset the previous master disk activations.

Jesper and Poet --> The original PC did in fact have a profibus connection card in it. I didn't really check, but I very much doubt the card is compatible in the new PC. It was desirable for the new maintenance PC to be in a more suitable location and it now sits only on the Ethernet network. The drives and field IO are on three separate profibus networks from the controller. This line was commissioned in 2002, and while we still call it the new sawline.. it is indeed getting old in the tooth.

Regarding STARTER software, when I was googling all about this I am pretty sure that I came across a few posts saying that STARTER was not compatible with the Masterdrive VC drives, that they can only do micromaster and sinamics. I have STARTER installed on the PC, but I did not venture too far with that software package.

JRW --> This is exactly where I came unstuck. The old PC was connected direct to the profibus network and I did not even know about this PG/PC object.. AB software has it's quirks and jerks as well, but at least I know about most of them!! haha..

I found multiple instances of PG/PC menus everywhere else, but this is the one that I needed. I was able to modify the settings with your screenshots and voila!! I am online!! I opened a Tech Support request with Siemens yesterday, it will be interesting to see what they come back with!! I guarantee it will not be as straight forward as yours!!

Hopefully someone stumbles across this post down the track because it will save them a lot of headache and effort.

Thanks again guys, many cheers!! My shout!!