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Firewire, External enclosures, Windows XP, and me [not Windows ME].

I

imported_Tram

Junior Member
So I got new drives from WD and threw them in two combo FireWire/USB enclosures. Now, these two enclosures work fine when I use them with USB on my PC. They work fine when I use them with USB or Firewire on my iBook. But, When I try to connect the drives, singly or chained, to my PC, they just will not detect. What am I missing?

I've tried connecting them to my built-in firewire, and to my PCI firewire card. I'm running XP with SP2, on an nforce4 motherboard. I'll be happy to post any other system information as well. Is there some sort of update that I need to use firewire drives in xp?

I switched the PCI slot my firewire card was in and tried again, and it detected my first drive, but not the daisy chained one. I then removed the drive properly (via "safely remove") and now neither drive will show up again.

my motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8NGA-K8NF-9. The card is some no-name.

My iPod also now no longer registers as a removable device when I try to connect it. I'll be around to post any additional required info or whatever. The card didn't throw windows into its 'new device' frenzy, but the USB ports work and I now have 2 firewire busses in device manager. I am just at the end of my rope here.
 
Is there a reason why you do not use them as USB on the PC?
(USB2 = 480Mbits/s vs. 1394a = 400Mbits/s [max])

You may want to check the Device Manager to see if they really are being detected
and there is a problem with Wizards.

Start \ Settings \ Control Panel \ System \ Hardware \ Device Manager
Click 'VIEW' on the toolbar and choose 'Show hidden devices'

Under 'Non-Plug & Play drivers', check to make sure that "1394 ARP Protocol Client" is
not errored out.

Under 'Storage', check to make sure there is not Duplicates of your firewire drives (i.e. more than 2)

Also, check the EVENT LOG to see if there are any errors listed in regards to Mass Storage
devices.

One last item, how do you have the Drives set (Master, Slave or Cable Select)?
 
Firewire devices can be daisy chained, which is convenient for me, since I already have a 16 foot firewire cable (I tried shorter ones too). Anyway, the speed of the drive is going to be limited by the ATA standard anyway, so 133Mb/s is as fast as it'll go no matter what.

Actually, the problem fixed itself when I rebooted to check the bios. I'd rebooted multiple times before this, but whatever. Hopefully it won't come back.
 
Since you posted this in another thread (not cool!) I will say the same thing. What you are seeing is an occasional insufficiency of power.

So, unless the enclosures have their own power sources, consider getting a powered 1394 hub and connecting them to it. Firewire is more power demanding than USB. But - for hard drives, it has a better sustained transfer rate for data.
 
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