Rabbit RFU in Vista won't program an RCM5400W

Rabbit
1

Hi,
Please help me solve this problem.

I have several PCs that are used to flash our RCM5400W boards. We recently set up a Vista PC with the Rabbit RFU flashing utility (DC 10.60, RFU 4.60). Flashing does not work on the Vista PC. We see the message

Sending Coldloader 
Failed to load image

.

This happens only on the Windows Vista PC. This is our first Vista PC to be used with RFU; all other PCs we used previously were running Windows XP, and we didn’t see this problem.

We’re using the USB programming cable, plugged into the RCM board properly. I can see the cable being detected in RFU and in Device Manager.

One more little detail - On our other PCs that flash the Rabbit successfully, if the cable is left disconnected from the Rabbit, or the cable is not even present, RFU still tries to load the Coldloader and then the Pilot. On this Vista PC it seems to not even make it that far.

2

De-selected Processor Verification, kept the Use USB<–> Serial converter enabled. Now it advances to to attempt the Pilot Bios. There is a familiar outcome - loaded 3397 of xxxxxx bytes.

Familiar, in that this is the same ending message I have seen in many other cases where a board just won’t take a flash program. The message was even the same in the older RFUs back to 10.54, etc.

3

Aha… We found that the little ribbon cable that goes from the shrink-wrapped USB module to the PROG port is wearing out. It sometimes works if you speak to it gently. [:*]