Why is my PC breaking my mbed, but Mac works fine?

23 Feb 2016

I am using a nRF51-DK mbed board and programming it from both my mac and PC. However, when I use my PC to compile a program and then download the `.hex` to the board, I get a `Fail.txt` file show up in the mbed file system. It reads:

SWD Error

After that, no matter what I do I get `fail.txt`

TIMEOUT

I move to my mac, boot the mbed board in bootloader mode and then reinstall the latest firmware. After a reboot, the device works fine. When I try to instal any more programs from my PC, it breaks again.

Why is my PC breaking my mbed?

NB: I am using a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 running Windows 10 Pro x64