Lacie Big Disk Firewire Problem

[James]

I see there's been some discussion of problems with Firewire external
hard disks. Can anyone out there help with this one...

I have a LaCie Big Disk Triple Extreme 500GB drive. On several
machines running XP SP2 (including a brand new Dell Dimension 5100) it
connects fine via USB but won't mount properly under Firewire (400 -
haven't tried 800 yet). I formatted the drive successfully via USB, it
mounts OK and shows up correctly in Disk Management. When I connect
via FW, it shows up as a "RAW" format drive.

In Device Manager, it lists as an SBP2 IEEE 1394 Compliant Device, and
both this and the OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller are listed
as working properly.

I downloaded Device Updater 2.0.1 from LaCie
(http://www.lacie.com/support/support_manifest.htm?pid=10279, June
2005) but it told me everything was already up to date.

I've seen various MS KB articles suggesting problems with the FW
implementation pre SP2 but can't figure this one out. Have got LaCie
tech support on the case but nothing so far...

Thanks in advance

James Bisset.

 

[Guest]

Does the drive show in Device Manager? And, if so, is there a statement that
it is, or is not, working properly?

My firewire drive was working fine - until I "updated" my backup software,
which apparently also updated some 1394 specific .sys files. I restored
them from the Windows .cab file, and all is right again.

 

[James]

It all shows correctly. My problem's been partly solved by
reformatting the disk via the Firewire 400 interface. It now shows up
under both FW400 and USB connections.

However, my next problem is that everything stops working when I
connect my DV cam to either the disk or the PC. On one machine I get a
blue screen which highlights the FW driver file 1394BUS.SYS as the
problem. On another, the disk just drops out as soon as I connect
another device via Firewire.

Anyone know how to solve it? Can you really daisy chain
computers/devices by Firewire using Firewire (liek you're supposed to)?

James.

 

[Jonny]

Using a Firewire connected drive that works okay. On the alternate firewire
connector of the firewire hard drive enclosure, I sometimes connect a
laptop. The PC to laptop connection also works okay. The PC and laptop
cannot share the firewire drive though, whoever "saw" it first, has usage.

I would determine if the DV camera works by itself to the PC's firewire
connection before daisy chaining
it on another firewire device. If it doesn't, the daisy chain
thing means nothing.

 

[James]

I'm trying this out on 2 different machines (at home and work). At
home, both DV cam and HDD can connect OK to the PC individually.
However, when I connect them both, either direct to the PC's 2 port FW
card or daisy chaining through the HDD, Win XP will see both devices,
but video capture fails after around 30 seconds in both MovieMaker2 and
Adobe Premiere Elements 1.

I applied 2 MS hotfixes (885222 and 886454). My event logs show up
Disk error 51 (An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D
during a paging operation) which hotfix 886454 was supposed to deal
with.

I'd like to know if anyone has successfully used multiple FW devices
under XP?

James.

 

[Jonny]

Will try my DV firewire connection via the firewire drive's second firewire
port, making a daisy chain. Let you know.
Normally, I use another PC onboard firewire port for more than one FW
connnection.

 

[James]

I've got a 2 port FW card but get the same problem as with daisy
chaining through the disk. Is your second FW port on the same card or
a different one? I'm getting the impression from other sources that
separate FW cards for devices is the way to go.

I'll be interested to know what you find.

James.