How to recover the drive after a failed firmware update

There are several reasons that can cause a failed firmware update on your drive and that you should try to avoid all the time. Some of them are:

• Having the public firewall in your computer ON during the firmware update.

• Powering off the drive during the firmware update.

• Disconnecting the Ethernet cable during the firmware update.

• Not waiting until the drive gets back to INIT state when performing the firmware update through FoE.

• Performing an FTP bootloader update while having TwinCAT connected.

An easy way to detect that the drive has not updated the firmware successfully is to check if the LEDs state changed from its normal operating conditions. If you are unsure of how the LEDs look like during normal operation, please check the How to interpret drive LEDs section of the manual. After a failed firmware update, the LEDs will be left looking like the following:

• LED4 → blinking red very slowly (~1 Hz)

• LED5 → off

• LED6 → solid green

Besides the LEDs state, other clear signs that the update process has not been completed successfully are:

• CANopen: You cannot connect to the drive in MotionLab3 directly in the IP 192.168.2.22

• EtherCAT: You cannot scan the drive in TwinCAT

However, this situation is 100% recoverable by performing some additional steps:

1. If you are using EVE (not EVS) drive, in most cases, the only thing that you have to do to recover the drive is to perform an additional FTP bootloader to the CANopen/EtherCAT version that you want to use. Therefore, power cycle the drive and close and open MotionLab3 again and use the FTP bootloader tool directly without scanning the drive. The firmware update process should be able to start and finish successfully. After that, you should be able to operate as before.

2. If the FTP bootloader update does not work at the first time or you are using a drive different to EVE, the steps needed are:

   1. Power off the drive 

   2. Make a connection between the respective pins for BOOT and GND_D of the I/O connector of your drive. You can find this information in the Connectors Guide for your drive. For example, the EVE-XCR information is located here: Connectors Guide.

   3. Power on the drive

   4. Perform the FTP bootloader firmware update as described in step #1 if you are using EVE-XCR. The FTP bootloader firmware is not available for any other drive. Please choose the correct option for your drive depending on the communcation protocol here: Firmware update. This time it should work fine, and it should complete successfully.

   5. Power off the drive again

   6. Remove the connection between the BOOT and the GND_D pins.

   7. Power on the drive again. Now everything should be working as before.

Do the connection of the pins CAREFULLY

It is extremely important to make the connection between pins BOOT and GND_D carefully and with the drive off.

Do not do it while the drive is powered and double-check that you are doing the connection to the correct pins. 

Not following this can lead to a permanent damage to the drive.