CD Drive won't show up!

  • Thread starter Thread starter LadyDungeness
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LadyDungeness

I've got a Sony laptop with an external CD/DVD drive. It's Firewire. I hooked it up and it powers up and whirs, but the
laptop won't recognize it. What should I do?


Lady Dungeness
Out of Danger until September
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Lady Dungeness
Out of Danger until September
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
 
First thing to check is if the device manager can see it. Power on the
laptop and external drive. Hook up the firewire connector to the laptop. Go
to device manager and see if you see a question or exclamation mark or
nothing at all.
 
Allen said:
First thing to check is if the device manager can see it. Power on the
laptop and external drive. Hook up the firewire connector to the laptop. Go
to device manager and see if you see a question or exclamation mark or
nothing at all.

I'd like to hear about what shows under Device Manager, and what
shows in Sisoftware Sandra.

Device Manager - Controller example
This is the chip on the motherboard, that does the Firewire

IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers
VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Controller
(drivers = 1394bus.sys, ohci1394.sys)

Device Manager - Storage entry
This corresponds to the chip inside the Sony Firewire CDROM, that
bridges between Firewire and IDE protocols. The SBP2 part, means
it uses the SCSI control block format and protocol, used by many
"foreign" storage devices. From a user perspective, this means
there wiil be information hiding, meaning it is harder for utilites
to see and comment on the CDROM drive part itself.

DVD/CD-ROM drives
ADS Technologies_ Inc. 1394 Storage+Repeater IEEE 1394 SBP2 Device
(drivers = cdrom.sys, redbook.sys, storprop.dll)

The third bit of information, comes from Sisoftware Sandra and its
"Physical Disk" icon. Clicking the "Physical Disk" lists the
CDROM drive itself, on the other side of the bridge chip.
On my Firewire enclosure, this is what I saw, and the name
of the drive is the only information. Nothing about
supported transfer rates or the like.

Matshita CD-ROM CR-588

If you can see the equivalent of "Matshita CD-ROM CR-588", you know
that the identity string came from the drive mechanism itself. You
might still not see a CDROM drive in Explorer, because Windows still
has another layer of software to handle the drive, there are the
Upperfilters and Lowerfilters etc. But if you cannot reproduce similar
entries to the ones above, that suggests to me, some kind of failure
on either the Firewire interface, the bridge chip inside the
enclosure, or the controller board strapped to the drive
mechanism itself.

I found another utility, that enumerates Firewire buses, but it
is part of a commercial development kit, and is not a free
download. And looking at the manual, it doesn't look that user
friendly in any case.

Paul
 
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