Chromatography Forum

We have had a ongoing problem in our lab with our Agilent GC 6890 (3 of them) having intermittent and inconsistent error messages where the display on the GC will read "signal 1 buffer full error". This happens during the middle of runs sometimes a day after the system has been rebooted, sometimes it may be 2-3 weeks.
Any ideas...? We are running MSD Chemstation, Version D.02 00 275

We also have a problem where we'll be in the middle of a run and all a sudden the Instrument Icon has disappeared and data that may have been running will be lost. The autosampler won't continue after that, since we run purge and trap, but there is no rhyme or reason as to what is going on. Our software on our computers is XP.

I think that this could be a data transfer problem between the GC and the PC. The raw data is stored in temporary memory in the GC, the buffer, and the PC takes the data out of the buffer. If the PC cannot take the data out of the buffer fast enough due to a slow connection, you may see this problem, as the buffer will become full. I have only seen this problem when trying to control a GC remotely over the internet and my home connection was slow. By reducing the data rate collection at the GC, I was able to solve it.

From the other problems that you describe, I would get somebody to look at your internet setup. It could even be something like somebody else is trying to use the same I.P address.

Gasman

when your GC has other detectors than MSD - they fill signal1 and signal2 buffer in GC.
GC chemstation reads these buffers - thus periodically exhausts them.
MSD chemtsation does not care.

Either turn off generic detector signal collection (from GC keyboard or in chemstation) or modify the method to read these detectors signal data.

I only have one MSD attached to each GC and no other detectors.

I will have our IT person look at the IP addresses, the computers all store their data on the individual hard drives and not on a server. They also don't all go down at the same time and they all vary when it will happen. Originally Agilent had said we still must have firewalls turned on, but that wasn't the case.

This problem as been ongoing since we installed this software a few years ago we have another that is running under D 01.02.16 and it never has this problem.

There is virtual detector "Test plot".

Please see how signal1 and signal2 are configured (bound to detector).
[Signal 1] and [Signal 2] GC buttons.

Hi Antonk,

What do you mean "see how the signals are configured"? I'm not sure what information you need or where to go on control panel. I see the test plot, but what information am I looking for?

The task is: Turn off data collection for Signal 1 and Signal 2.

Press the [Signal] [1] and examine - if it can be turned off.

Also have a look at your method. If there is no way to disable data collection for GC signals - it make sense to start data collection - and just ignore them.

IMO page 41 of
http://www.chem.agilent.com/Library/use ... -90070.pdf
Enable GC signal collection and do not [_] store them.