Chromatography Forum

Hi,

we were operating our GCMSD for almost many years and we never came across this problem...

A sequence was interrupted in the middle, the only meaningful error in the log was:

Fatal sequence error detected
Instrument Control - Make Directory Failed

Method was running countless times without such error, sample naming and directory was not much different from other sequences.

Hard to narrow down the causes for this behaviour.

Here is what I tired so far:

• Restart of the computer and therefore all software was not solving it.
• Restarting the GC, which i got aware of in an ancient agilent community post but I kept the MS up and running for now.
• The creation of a new sequence table with the exact same entries as in the one that failed.

These last steps got everything started at least and I will update the process.


If anybody has a clue, I would really appreciate it. Otherwise this post is just to make this known..

This sounds like a computer problem, it doesn't seem to relate to your method. For some reason Chemstation couldn't create a directory (most likely the one where it would put the results), could be many reasons:
- Not enough disk space
- Disk corruption
- Software bug
- Network interruption (if it's a network disk as opposed to a typical hard drive)
- ...

Update:

The sequence was interrupted again and failed after 5-6 measurements with the same error.

Thank you, sbashkyrtsev, for your comments. I can rule out:

• Not enough disk space: several gigs are available
• Disk corruption: could be, but it would be hard to track down. I will perform a defrag, etc...
• Software bug: always possible on Windows 7 and this old Chemstation, this would be too hard to track down, and seems unlikely, this setup was running for years...
• Network interruption: possible, but a bit unlikely, nothing has changed, some samples work, nothing was changed..

Still searching what is going on though..

Make sure you have installed service pack 1 and 2. Those corrected a lot of issues on E02 that I was having.

Otherwise at some point it takes longer to troubleshoot some corrupted software issue than to just wipe the drive and reinstall the OS and Chemstation. That is probably what I would opt for.

Any odd characters in some of the datafile names - mainly the ones at which point it fails?

If there are any spaces in the name maybe try using "_" instead of a space, sometimes the software doesn't like spaces in the names.

I had one last year 5973 but same software and it would create the files but not allow them to be opened. We had to replace the computer before it started working again. The problem for us was it created files with no ownership and it would not allow opening for QEdit and reports after that.