transceiver toolkit does not detect links

[Altera_Forum]

I have two Arria II GX boards connected over a transceiver link. One board is ours and has an eSATA interface. The other board is a Arria II GX dev kit (6Gbps version) with a terasIC SATA/SAS HSMC daughter card. We flipped the connector on one end of an eSATA cable to essentially turn it into a null modem cable where Tx on one end maps to Rx on the other end and vice versa. 

 I did extensive testing with this exact same setup about a year ago - same cable, same boards. But now I can't get the transceiver toolkit console to see any links. It sees the target FPGAs (USB Blaster cable connected to each board) and I've loaded the two design .sof files (modified versions of the transceiver toolkit example design - same modified designs used successfully last year) and the toolkit associates the designs to the two target FPGAs correctly.  The attached .jpg file shows the toolkit console with everything connected and the designs loaded. As you can see, all of the link controls on the right side are grayed out.  My recollection from last year is that everything just came up and worked without jumping through any hoops. What am I missing?  Fyi, this particular setup has the links running at 3Gbps with no 8b10b. We ran last year all the way up to 6.375Gbps, so 3Gbps is barely breaking a sweat.  Any and all help appreciated.  Thanks, Bob

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---   My recollection from last year is that everything just came up and worked without jumping through any hoops. What am I missing?   --- Quote End ---   Which version of Quartus are you running?  I've found cases where the TTK does not work properly in newer versions of Quartus. I had to manually create the links (and then it worked).  Cheers, Dave

[Altera_Forum]

Hi Dave - 

 I'm running 13.0 sp1. This is the same version I ran last year when I did this and it worked fine.  How do I manually create links?  Thanks for the reply. Bob

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---   I'm running 13.0 sp1. This is the same version I ran last year when I did this and it worked fine.   --- Quote End ---   Ok, so your problem might be something else (since it used to work with that version).    --- Quote Start ---   How do I manually create links?   --- Quote End ---   On the version I was testing (I forget exactly which - probably 14.0 64-bit) there was a setup button on the TTK GUI, and I had to link the pattern generator + PHY + pattern checker for each lane (I was doing multi-lane setups).  I'm in the process of repeating those tests under 14.1, but this time I am documenting what I did so I can more easily repeat the tests :)  Cheers, Dave

[Altera_Forum]

Yeah, I was digging through my old engineering notebook last night looking for the secret sauce from last year. Came up empty. When I get this working again I also will be documenting things in detail. How many times do I have to learn that lesson in my career? Write everything down!!! 

 Thanks again for chiming in. I'll post back when I figure it out.  Best, Bob