Has anyone else had any issues with shipping pre-programmed CompactFlash Cards, and those cards losing their program, or it getting corrupted?
We’ve had this issue a few times. I want to give our customer an updated plc program, so I either restore an image to the compactflash card, or program it directly from Automation Studio. Our targets are all X20CPUs. When the customer receives the flash card, the CPU boots up in service mode.
I didn’t think putting a flash on an airplane would corrupt the program, but something weird is going on.
I’ve never personally heard of issues like this arising from shipping a CompactFlash card, and I know many people use it as a way to quickly restore machines. Perhaps someone else has a different experience they can share.
However, it is good that the PLC is in Service mode. If the memory was corrupted, the target might end up in Diagnostic mode where Automation Runtime has failed to boot correctly. In Service mode, your program is fully installed but none of the cyclic tasks are running due to an application error (missing module with Module Supervision enabled, cycle time violation, etc.). You can see this post for more information. If you are able to diagnose remotely or get a log file from the customer, you should be able to figure out what’s going on and then you can compare to other machines that have the same problem.
Honestly, I have never heard about it. Would be great to upload logger e.g. using SDM and investigate what is real cause of service mode of PLC. Could be that problem is not corrupted program but e.g. supervising mode of missing module, or something similar. The last but not least you can provide customer not only CF card but also automatic project installation using PviTransfer.
unfortunately, with this machine/customer, there was no time to trouble shoot. This was an upgrade, and when it didn’t work right away, he put the previous flash in. The machine uses a PPT as a display running as a VNC viewer, so the display never came up. So I couldn’t look at the SDM or logger.
Any digital memory medium is susceptible to damage and data loss over time, metal detectors cause more harm than x-ray machines, so the possibility that it was corrupted at the aéroport is there, but it would be really strange, especially if it has happened multiple times with multiple CFcards…
I understand that the customer just plugged in back old CF without investigation. But AR log can be gotten from CF card itself, if you plug it into the CF reader. So before you investigate what has happened during transport, I would really ask for the logger. Maybe the solution is easier than it looks like right now 
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This post provides the steps to pull the logbook directly from the CF card.
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