New system and Full Hard drive

Jetman

Hi guys,

 

Something important here for ABB to know.

 

As previously seen in other posts, it is possible to encounter a problem when trying to download a new system in the controller if the hard drive is full.

 

It is, however, not simply a matter of removing the old system because it is possible that you will still not have enough space.

 

It happened to me last week.

 

How you can remove a system and still have no space for the next is probably a matter of the system requiring more space on the drive during installation than it needs when it's done installing (temp files, decompression, etc).

 

In my case, someone made a mistake and copied the content of his USB stick to the controller hard drive. It did so until the hard drive was completely full. The content of his USB Stick was copied inside the /Temp directory.

 

Removing the old system did not erase this /Temp directory.

 

After the old system was erased, we were stuck in the Boot application with no possibility to install a new system because of space requirements but not able to erase anything on the hard drive either.

 

My suggestion to ABB would be to add some option in the Boot application to erase everything on the Harddrive so it's possible to free empty space (exept maybe the 3 files needed to run the Boot).

 

I was only able to get out of this by using Hyper Terminal and connecting to the robot Console with a null modem cable. I was then able to erase stuff using the the Vxworks OS command lines.

 

This is not something everyone knows about though and there is not much documentation about it. I'm not even sure my local ABB support would have known about it unless it asks Sweeden.

 

That reinforce the need for ABB to add something in the Boot Application I think, so we can start with a new empty drive (Except the boot files themselves).

 

Hope it helps.

 

Jet