failed to upload - failed the loopback: IDE looks at wrong port?

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

Hello,

I put my mega-enet combo into work and tried to continue working with a new mega-ethernet clones

First attached to the regular win 8.1 machine with ide 1.6.4 and got

avrdude: ser_open(): can't open device "\.\COM7": The system cannot find the file specified.

Then i attached it to a win7 machine which ran 1.6.3 and uploaded the same code running on the first board. It worked OK

Than i downgraded the win 8.1 machine to 1.6.3. Same symptom.

I then ran the loopback test of the troubleshooting pinned post and am getting
Board at COM7 is not available

BUT When looking at port in ide or wins device manager, it says port 8

Thanks for your time

Guy

2

The IDE looks at the port you tell it to look at. Are you not selecting the port from Tools->Port?

3

Well, It was showing port 8 (only) so i naively thought this was the one he new the card to be attached to. Now i explicitly selected the (unique) port shown and a tick appeared by the port et voila

It's not intuitive to think you've got to select an option when it's the only one so, unless i am particularly stupid, the same can happen to other users

Thank you John