Connection issues with Agilent 6890 and 5973N MSD

[spthom77]

Hi,
I have an older Agilent 6890/5973 system that I am having trouble establishing a connection to. This system has been set up for a number of years without much trouble. Recently, I was getting a Lens Supply Fault and got in contact with a company in California that will do repairs on the MSD boards. They recommended I ship out both the main board (front half) and the side board for troubleshooting. They discovered an issue with the main board, made the repairs and sent them back. I have just reinstalled the boards and now I cannot get chemstation to bring up the MSD. If I disconnect the cable to the MSD, I can bring up the GC but with both parts connected, the software just times out. I do not get any error codes, just a blank window with an 'OK' button on it that closes the program when pressed. I am running GPIB connection but no settings have been changed. I am going to be reaching back out to the company that did the repairs but I am hoping there is some easy(ish) fix that doesn't require sending the boards back out. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Sean

[James_Ball]

Contact the repair company and ask if they did a firmware flash to bring the board up in version to something their system could read. If they flashed it to something incompatible with the GPIB interface then that could be the problem.

From the Config program you can run tests in the help menu to see if it is actually communicating and it may be able to tell you what firmware it has versus what it is looking for. We recently had an instrument that would start but never finish loading and give an "option 6 out of range" error that ended up being a problem that the firmware on the instrument was too low for the software on the computer, a firmware flash solved the problem and it booted up just fine after that.