Panel View Plus 7 losing .mer

To make a long story short, my customer has a Panelview that had an application already running in it. I had trouble connecting to it from my laptop. So I shut down the running application and went into Terminal Settings. I could not find any .mer files! So then I rebooted the Panelview. Now I got a message saying there was no application in the Panelview. The application that was running a few minutes ago, seems to have disappeared completely! I ended up having to load a .mer file from a few days ago. It seems that all the .mer's stored in the Panelview have somehow completely disappeared. Anyone seen anything like this before?

Is it possible there's an SD card or USB drive inserted where the .mer files are stored?

mylespetro said:

Is it possible there's an SD card or USB drive inserted where the .mer files are stored?

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I second this. I remember seeing 3rd party vendors who would load the application onto an SD card which would make it non-obvious at first.

To get to the SD, select the remote location from the Transfer Utility; the program should be there.

Let us know if that's not the case; I've never seen a PanelView lose files.

Cheers,
Vlad

There is a USB drive but there are no .mer files on it. There is no SD card inserted. When I tried using the Transfer Utility, neither the Internal Storage, nor External Storage 1, nor External Storage 2 showed any .mer files. I'll have to keep an eye on it and see if the same issue happens again.

Update: after getting error messages on bootup and talking to Rockwell tech support, they recommended to reset the Panelview to factory default. I'm about to start another thread on this. Anyway, in case someone has similar issues and sees this thread, I figured I'd update this.

Anyone seen anything like this before?

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Twice.

Once, the engineer had loaded the *.MER into RAM from a USB drive then removed the drive. The terminal ran fine for months, until it was power cycled and tried to load its *.MER from the now-absent USB drive.

Another time, the engineer had put a batch script on a USB drive that did an AutoRun to delete all the *.MER and *.LOG files on the terminal, as part of an initialization process. Somebody put that USB drive into the terminal, watched the CMD prompts fly by, took it out, and forgot about it. The terminal ran fine for hours, until it was power cycled and discovered it had no *.MER files, and the engineer found that killer USB drive in the cabinet and remembered what was on it.

Both times, that foolish engineer was some guy named Ken, who really ought to know better.

I'm not saying it's impossible for a PanelView Plus to "lose" a *.MER file (especially if there's a failing interface to SD or internal flash drives, which sounds like it has triggered a POST or BIOS error on your terminal) but when this happens, it is most probable that the *.MER was deleted or removed unintentionally from wherever it was in the storage filesystem.

Same here...

Downloaded the Runtime to 'Run at start-up', however, I left the 'Download as...' .mer Name box empty.

The terminal 'took it' as such and ran it happily, until, the same bonehead went about uploading it...Obviously, there was 'nothing' to upload...

Thanks, good to know there's a few things that can cause this and I'm not just going crazy haha