Computer Hope
Hardware => Hardware => Topic started by: katberts on June 10, 2010, 05:23:07 PM
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I can't seem to find this problem anywhere so I'm hoping somebody here can help me! Up until yesterday, my com port on my Panasonic Toughbook CF-52 was working hunky dory nice. A coworker was using it to troubleshoot and then it happened....the terminal emulation screen went blank and you could no longer type anything to the terminal emulation program. I uninistalled the terminal emulation program, reinstalled it - no good. I was able to narrow down that it is not the terminal emulation program (I tried 3 of them with the same results - hyperterm, Procomm and cryptoterm) but the fact that I when I type, no letters appear on the emulation screen. I uninstalled the com port (I'm on com port 1), rebooted the laptop and the com port was reinstalled but the same issue appears over and over and over - I cannot type to any device using com 1. I tried changing the keyboard types on the emulation programs to no avail. I know the com port works because I can see the OS of my cisco 3750 switch loading just fine but when it comes time for me to start configuring - nada, nothing comes on the screen.
Has anyone ever had anything like this happen to them? I would soooo greatly appreciate any assistance and help anyone can provide.
Thanks very much!
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we understand you are using the COM port on laptop to communicate with another device using hyper terminal or some other type of terminal in a simulation program. then suddenly it stopped working.
Of the many things you have tried, you did not say if you had just tried using a simple hardware look back tester. This is usually the first thing we use when we suspect a com port has gone bad. We just plug in the little gadget and see if we can talk ourselves. That is to say, on a terminal program you will type a character and that will come back and echo the character so every time you type something it chose back ike this:
hello world
OR
hheellllooo wwoorrlldd
if using half duplex.
One of your junior technicians should have this in his test kit. If you cannot get a terminal program to work with a loop back faster, the com port is shot.
But it it does work on the loop aback test, you have bad cable(s).
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Ah! I didn't even think about a loopback tester. I've never used one with a com port so I'm not sure how they're made up - can you help me with that? I've got my phone guys that can make it if I know the pin outs.
Thank you sooo very much!!!
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Goggle com port loopback
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3450
http://www.passmark.com/support/loopback.htm
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thank you sooo very much for all of your help on this!!!! I'll let you know what happens!