Updating Your AT E Series EEPROM

If you have an AT E Series device shipped prior to December 1995, you should run the EEUPDATE Utility to update your EEPROM contents to match those of current AT E Series devices.

You can fix the following problems with the EEUPDATE Utility.

• The configuration manager or PnP BIOS in your computer assigns the DMA level for the floppy drive to your AT E Series device. This typically results in a floppy drive failure during power-up with your AT E Series device in the computer.

  Solution—Start your computer without the floppy drive support, then run the EEUPDATE Utility and reprogram the EEPROM with the Default ISA option.

  Note  The EEUPDATE program must already reside on your hard drive for this solution to work. If the EEUPDATE Utility is not already installed on your hard drive, install it before disabling your floppy drive.

• Your ISA bus computer has an EISA DMA controller, which can cause the Plug and Play BIOS of your computer to assign the device some of the lower DMA channels: 0, 1, 2, or 3. NI-DAQ cannot use these DMA channels.

  Solution—Run the EEUPDATE Utility and reprogram the EEPROM with the Default ISA option.

• The first logical device of an AT E Series device has only three basic configurations associated with it instead of four. The fourth basic configuration assigns the device only a base address, with no DMA or IRQ resources.

  Solution—Run the EEUPDATE Utility and reprogram the EEPROM with the Default ISA option or Default EISA option, depending on the bus type of your computer.

• The AT E Series device is installed in an EISA bus machine and you want to use DMA 0, 1, 2, or 3. (Devices manufactured after December 1995 were factory-configured in a Default ISA mode, and the device will not request DMA channels 0, 1, 2, or 3).

  Solution—Run the EEUPDATE Utility and reprogram the EEPROM with the Default EISA option.

• Your AT E Series device is configured for an EISA bus computer, but you now want to use it in an ISA bus computer. (Devices manufactured prior to December 1995 were factory-configured in a Default EISA mode.)

  Solution—A custom configuration option is available, but you should not run this option without first consulting an applications engineer at National Instruments.

If you need to update the EEPROM on your AT E Series device, download the file eeupdate.zip from the Web site.