How to circumvent Maintenance Wash on HiSeq 2500?

[pmiguel]

With the new HiSeq 2500 control software came a mandatory maintenance wash before starting a run. Meaning HCS will refuse to start a sequencing run until it is convinced you had done a maintenance wash.

That is reasonable until you run into a weird glitch which causes the the maintenance wash you just did somehow not to be recorded. (Possibly due to a windows update that included lots of dotNet updates.)

Illumina Tech support doesn't know of a work-around, other than to do another maintenance wash (2.5 hours). But my guess is that there is an .xml file somewhere that just needs the relevant field updating. Anyone know?

--
Phillip

[GW_OK]

Does it still demand the wash even if you kill HCS and re-initialize? Or reboot?

[pmiguel]

Does it still demand the wash even if you kill HCS and re-initialize? Or reboot?

Yes. The current version of HCS is in "strict" mode with respect to washing. No wash done, no run start. Period. Tech support appears not to have any leeway on this -- they don't seem to even know how one would circumvent if necessary.

I think the problem was that after doing a maintenance wash it is not "checked off" as done until you click the final "next" button. Normally you would do that to get the home screen with the "sequence", "wash", "check", etc. buttons on it. But I wanted to do a reboot before starting a run. So I saw the wash was complete, acknowledged it and then exited HCS.

After installing some updates and rebooting, when I started HCS, it seemed tabula rasa as far as that last wash was concerned. So I needed to do another maintenance wash. 2.5 hour delay. More after I spent some time on the phone trying to brow-beat tech support into circumventing the issue to no avail.

Of course then there is some weird focusing issue when we do start the run that we end up trying to troubleshoot end of day as a result of the delay...

--
Phillip

[daantje]

Hi, In the instrument maintenance folder there is an xml file that is called
InstrumentState.xml When you open this file you can see the state of each flowcell, for example (maintenance wash, none, postrun, water). Simply open this document in notepad and change the status from wash into none. Then re-open Control software. Usually this works.

Hope this brings you in the right direction,
Daan

[kwaraska]

How does this work when switching from one mode to another? We tried this to bypass the High Output mode but the .xml file indicated no wash was needed.

Do you subsitute <HighOutput> where it says <RapidRun> ?

[Doug]

Where is this InstrumentState.xml file located on the HiSeq PC? I did a search and looked through every directory I could think of and couldn't find it.

[HESmith]

InstrumentState is a binary file, not XML. Good luck trying to edit that...

[GenoMax]

Only service engineers apparently can override this now with a special utility program. They are not likely to let others have a copy.

[pmiguel]

There is a text InstrumentState.xml file on my instrument.
I presume it is read when HCS starts.
I think I have only had one subsequent time where I needed to circumvent.

--
Phillip

[HESmith]

Interesting; what version of HCS are you running?

[pmiguel]

Interesting; what version of HCS are you running?

2.0.10.0

I can see both an InstrumentState.xml and an InstrumentState.bin file in the same directory.

I presume HCS uses the .bin file unless HCS is restarted. (Speculation, though.)

Of course, under normal circumstance better to just do the requested washes. I only want to circumvent if the washes were done but somehow did not register.

--
Phillip

[HESmith]

We're running the same version, but only the binary file is present. I suspect the permissions are modified on our instrument (and others) so that the XML is accessible only to the FAS. Thanks for the info, Phillip.

-Harold