Blue Screen from Firewire Harddrive

[Guest]

I have a server admin (Win2000, SP4, Dell PowerEdge2600) who had to hook up a
removable firewire hard drive to add disk space. We had a power outage and
the server either was shut down properly by the UPS or forced out by the loss
of power.
In any case, when the server booted back up it would go through the loading
of drivers, etc. and then get a blue screen. We were able to determine that
it was fine without the external hard drive.
He had to install a PC card (his words, maybe he meant PCI) with a Firewire
adapter in order to connect the drive.

I think the power outage had nothing to do with the problem; it may have
been ready to surface on the next reboot. That doesn't explain why he has
been able to reboot the server in the past with the drive connected without
trouble.
He hooked the drive up to a Mac with built in Firewire and had no problems.
I realize it could be the adapter, maybe its driver.
Has anyone had any similar kinds of problems using such as setup?
If you need more device details, I will get them.

Thanks.

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Does the PCI Firewire card work correctly in another PC. Have you tried
another PCI Firewire card in the first PC in question?

 

[Guest]

The admin hasn't had the luxury of removing the firewire card (yeah, I think
he meant to say it's a PCI card and not a PC card) because he would need to
bring down the server..
But, are you thinking that the card and not the drive is the culprit?
Should we look into upgrading the driver for the card?

Thanks.

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

I would certainly try uninstalling and reinstalling the card first...... you
don't have to physically remove the card, just go into the Device Manager,
right click on the card and select uninstall. Then reboot. Windows should
automatically reinstall the card. If you are up to date on SP installs,
Windows should have the latest drivers included.

 

[Guest]

OK. Just one thing I would like to confirm:
The server is fine with the Firewire card installed - Until the external
hard drive is plugged into it.
In that case, do you still think the card and not the drive would be the
culprit?
Thanks.

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Check the drive on another PC... that should enable you to get a better idea
which hardware device is the problem.

 

[Guest]

Right, I spoke with the Admin today. He tried the drive on another Windows
machine and got the same results, or at least he couldn't read the data.
In fact, on the Mac that I had previously mentioned, some of the data was
inaccessible on that as well.

He plugged another FireWire drive into the server and there were no problems.
I guess either the power outage zapped the drive, or more likely it was
about to fail on the next boot.

By the way, what a horrilble solution for adding additional storage to a
server. You pay all this money for RAID and SCSI drives, then put equally
important data on a device that's more prone to failure and has no redundancy.
But that's what happens when you can't get management to spend the money.

Thanks.