The old programming laptop died, hard drive gone, and no backup anyone can find. The machine is a granulator with a CPU 315-2 DP, still running fine.
Got STEP 7 V5.6 on a new laptop and did Upload station to PG. All the blocks came in, but every one of them is just DB1.DBX0.0, M10.3, I4.5, no names, no comments, no network titles. Its unreadable. I tried PLC, Upload from the blocks folder, and an upload with the CPU in STOP as well, same both times.
Is there a setting to upload with symbols that I'm missing? Or is the CPU missing a memory card that held them? There's an MMC in it, 512 KB I think. Could someone explain what actually lives in the CPU and what only ever lived on that dead laptop?
Do you have the panel project, or the panel itself? An MP277 or similar has a tag list with names against the same addresses, which gives you most of the symbol table back. Which panel is on the machine?
MP277 10 inch. No project for it either, same dead laptop. Can I pull the tags out of the panel?
There is no upload with symbols on a 300. Symbols, comments and network titles live only in the offline project, the CPU stores compiled code and nothing else. The MMC does not change that. Nothing was lost from the CPU, it went with the laptop.
What you can do: hunt for an old archive, a zip on a USB stick, a copy on the OEM's side. Then the panel. If the project went down to it with upload enabled you can pull it back off with ProSave, and its tag list gives you names for everything the panel touches. Drawings for the rest.
Someone did a decent article on keeping this from happening twice: https://plctr.com/best-practices-for-plc-program-documentation/
Found a 2016 archive on a USB stick in the drawer under the panel. Opened it, symbols and comments are there, and most of it matches what's in the CPU. Uploaded the blocks into that project and the newer changes came in without names, the rest are fine.
So nothing was lost out of the CPU at all, it never held the symbols in the first place. What went missing went with the laptop, and the 2016 archive with the upload on top of it got most of it back.
The blocks changed after 2016 are still bare, maybe four of them. Will go through the panel tags for those. Thanks sergio74 and kiran_s.
A USB stick in the drawer. That's how half of these end.