Hi Legends, I have a site I look after the IT. They have a Panel PC connected doing wonderful things. I think it cuts up materials for Air Conditioners.
Anyway my involvement in the past, is to get the PC working after it dies. IE the hard drive goes belly up.
Now I have got the HD backup of the working machine. I restored it and when the PC loads up Windows XP then starts AR Win it restarts the box on a groundhog day loop.
AR Win starts then says warm restart and starts this magical journey of a boot loop.
I stopped that by disabling startup of ARWIN, and the logs don’t really tell me much.
The customer really doesn’t want to shell out a quarter of a million to replace the whole thing.
Is it possible that AR Win needs re-loading or is this thing cooked?
Now the OEM, is trying to source a replacement from China which I have been told could take a month.
Can any of you legends help, not looking for charity either, if you get a working box there is some cabbage in it for you.
ARWin is pretty old at this point and my personal experience with it is limited, but I have a few ideas that will hopefully get the conversation going.
I think the fact that you have Windows booting is a good sign because it means the PC itself is working.
The first thing I’d recommend checking is the BIOS settings. Depending on the PC type, there are different required BIOS settings for ARWin (for example, see here for the PPC2100). I can’t find any information about the settings for a PPC700 in the current version of the documentation, but it might be worth checking to see if any of the settings for newer PCs are available in your BIOS menu.
If you’re able to uninstall and reinstall ARWin (and have the ability to restore the Automation Studio project or a backup of it) I think that also makes sense as a next step. Since Windows seems to be working fine, reinstalling ARWin from scratch should hopefully fix any configuration issues. There is some information on Requirements and Limitations for the installation process in the documentation.
One final thought is that the warm restart could be caused by something unrelated to ARWin specifically. For example, with default settings, a controller will restart if configured hardware is not connected. That usually results in the PC booting into Service mode rather than a boot loop, but maybe that’s happening in conjunction with something else.