Chromatography Forum

We have a couple of GC 6890 connected via HPIB that will, after a couple of days idle while connected to the Chemstation software, will give the following message:

"Instrument power off/on detected. Please close and restart the instrument session to connect to the instrument."

Any ideas as to what is causing and/or how to correct?

Thank you in advance for your time and help.

This happens occasionally in our lab as well, both HPLC and GC, and believe also with our LAN-communicating ones. When this happens we do what our outsourced consumer information lines tells our customers when the scrub doesn't come out of the containers: "You must re-boot".

So turn of the instrument including autosampler module, turn off computer, turn on modules, start up computer. Then start up ChemStation. Sometimes we find that none of the clicks on the computer will work, and we can't even shut down Chemstation or Windows, must physically power off or unplug the computer and start again.

My lab also has a GC 6890N which comes up with an error message "sampler power on/off detected. "

I have tried rebooting severally but it doesn't seem to work. What could be the cause? How can I fix it?

Thank you

I figured the solution to this problem. Such a silly little thing.

All you have to do is make sure your data file name/sequence name is no longer than 14 characters. Once your shorten this to something shorter it works like magic. It took me several long calls to the Agilent tech team to figure this out. But they are pretty good and helpful. I got a wonderful service.


Hope this helps you.

Sheesh that is a crazy error message then.

Being old and paranoid and not very trusting of programmers, I always keep data file names that fit the ancient 8.3 spec from MSDOS.

/grumble

I'm have the same error message "sampler on/off detected. Please close and restart the instrument session to connect to the sampler." on our GC 6890.

I called Agilent and they said it was the character length of the method name, sequence name, or data path name. The are limited to 16,16,15 respectively for the B.03.01 version of Chemstation. However, none of my character limits exceed those amounts and they have not changed in several years.

Could there be something wrong with hardware in the injector tower or something going on with the controller box?

I had a unit that did that for a few months very occasionally - eventually it became bad enough to address - we swapped out the controller box with another unit to fix it. I do not know what was wrong in that case, but the controller was involved.