XP not recognize Firewire external drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter skivi
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skivi

I've been looking all over the internet for a solution for this:
I have a 300gb drive in an external case which has both USB 2 and
firewire. I have used this external case on a mac with firewire with
excellent success (much better than USB - i can't boot off it!)
now i also have an older toshiba laptop with a small firewire port, and
the drive is not recognised in windows xp!
In device manager i have a Texas Inst. OHCI compliant ieee 1395host
controller, and a 1394 net adaptor which is also in network
connections.
nothing happens when i connect the drive with firewire. nothing. i have
rescanned for hardware changes, but nothing happens!!!! the drive is
newly partitioned and shows up on my mac nicely. what is the deal?!?!!
i can find no support from microsoft AT ALL about how to get a drive
showing up.
any ideas anyone??!?!?!
 
Power for the drive?? That "small" connector on the laptop is most likely
the 4-pin connector, where no power is included..


--
Tumppi
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Most learned on these newsgroups
Helsinki, FINLAND
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hiya, thanks for the reply:
yes, i have the 4-pin connector on my laptop, and the 6 pin on my
external drive, which is externally powered. i am using a 6 to 4 pin
convertor on m 6 pin cable.
the drive runs fine using the usb cable, but my laptop only has usb 1.1
( thus the need to use firewire) and i want to use that port for my
mouse anyway.

there is no hard drive activty when i plug the firewire in. if the
computer showed me an "unknown device" in device manager that would be
great! then i could start looking for drivers, but NOTHING shows up!!

thanks again for your help
 
skivi said:
hiya, thanks for the reply:
yes, i have the 4-pin connector on my laptop, and the 6 pin on my
external drive, which is externally powered. i am using a 6 to 4 pin
convertor on m 6 pin cable.
the drive runs fine using the usb cable, but my laptop only has usb 1.1
( thus the need to use firewire) and i want to use that port for my
mouse anyway.

there is no hard drive activty when i plug the firewire in. if the
computer showed me an "unknown device" in device manager that would be
great! then i could start looking for drivers, but NOTHING shows up!!

thanks again for your help
Click to expand...

Possibly, the converter you spoke of is the problem. Try a true 4 pin to 6
pin firewire cable. That's what I use connecting my laptop to a firewire
drive.
 
hey guys thanks for your thoughts - no, at this stage no other firewire
device works - the only other device i have is an old ipod, and it also
doesn't show up.
The 6 to 4 pin converter shouldn't be a problem - thats what it's
designed for and it's brand new too! I called Toshiba support incase
this port wasn't design for external drives somehow but they say that's
what it's for...
I'm really at a loss here...
 
ok i retract last post:
an old ipod (2nd gen) with direct firewire cable DOES show up as a
drive. (using the 6 to 4 pin converter).

I also have an old 60gb drive (which is formatted as a mac fs) and it
shows up in device manager>disk drive and in disk management as
"unallocated" but this 300gb when used in the same external enclosure
won't show up in device manager at all.

I'm starting to think it's some limitation on the firewire chip in the
enclosure, but it all works fine with usb2 and with a smaller drive so
why not this 300gb?!!

I can't find ANY offical info on firewire/1394 and any limitations of
the FW chips anywhere online.

any ideas?
 
Also should mention:
The 300gb has been formatted on another computer via USB using
maxblast4 which came with my 300gb drive. i have 3 partitions 15gb,
50gb, and 200-something gb.
will this affect the firewire connection?
 
ok, update:

i have successfully used this 300gb drive with firewire on another pc
laptop. The drives are just instantly recognized and mount in my
computer, so it's not the enclosure - it's my laptop.

comparing the differences between my device manager and the other shows
the working pc installs a "SBP2 Compliant ieee 1394 device" when i plug
in the drive
This is what my computer does not do.

does anyone have any experience with this? I've tried to manually force
install this sbp2 driver but cannot.
the only thing I can think of is i tried a while ago to install a demo
vhpd1394 controller program by thesycon. maybe this is blocking the
sbp2 compliant device?

I've installed all the microsoft patches and fixes for ieee 1394 but
they haven't helped.

appreciate any info/advice
 
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