MAX's com ports' designations changed after reinstalling OS and NI softwares.

[rpd]

I have several serial cards installed in a pxi chassis. After formatting the hard drive, installing OS and NI softwares; I found out that the com ports' designations has changed from the original configuration. I see this change both from the NI max and pc's device manager. I try using the NI MAX configuration wizard. I first save (export) the configuration, then format the HD, then reinstall softwares and then retrieve (import) the configuration but that still did not change the com ports' designations back to the saved configuration. Any help is appreciated.

[Ebele_Obijiofor]

Hi rpd,
What version of NI-Serial are you using? What controller and serial board do you have?
You can try the following to change the serial port assisgnments from device manager:

• Go to Start >> Settings >> Control Panel, and double-click on the System icon.
• Select the hardware tab, and click on the device manager button.
• Expand the Ports(COM & LPT) tree, and double click on a port to configure it.
• Click on the port settings tab, and click the advanced button to bring up the Advanced settings dialog window.
• Select a COM number from the COM Port Number drop down menu, and click OK. ( You can use a COM number that's designated as in use as long as no hardware is actually using it)
  

Good luck!

[rpd]

HI Belle,

The NI-Serial is the version  1.5. Chassis is PXI-1045. The serial cards are RS-232 and RS-485. What I want to do is force serial ports designations back to what it was before I formatted the hard drive ( my projects involves steps of "resurrecting" the system to its original settings in case it needs a new pc). I do not want to manually select each port and set it one by one if that can be avoided.

[Ebele_Obijiofor]

Hi rpd,

Windows randomly detects the boards and assigns numbers to the ports, so it doesn't seem like there's a way to do what you want. One thing you could try is  to recover unused COM numbers from  MAX before you install the serial boards. (Tools>>NI Serial >> Recover unused COM numbers.). Try this, and with some luck, it might assign the port numbers as you had them previously.

Regards,

[ATS, LLC]

Windows does some fun stuff for us integrators, like assigning ports in unusual and unrepeatable ways. I have changed ports in XP and 2K and here's how I do it in XP:

Navigate to Device Manager (control panel>system>hardware>device manager) and select Ports

From there double click on the port you want to change or right-mouse click and choose properties. On the properties page, go to "Port Settings" page and click on the 'Advanced" button.

There is a menu ring with all available and used ports. If you want to change that particular port to one that is already assigned, just reassign the used port to one that is well out of the way first, then change the one you need.

Hope this helps!

ATS