OT-Last Resort

vitalforce wrote on 5/7/2005, 5:25 PM
I'm editing a DV feature (with Vegas ) and turned off my twin WD 250GB firewire drives to have lunch (been using them about 2 months). On restarting the system, one of the drives has disappeared from the system. Just try and find out what to do from the Western Digital site. I'm using a Dell PC running Win XP Home.

The drives are those "combo" (IEEE and USB) drives with that "Safe Shutdown" power button on the front. The button blinks a while before it goes off and that always made me a little uncomfortable. They are not chained together--each one is wired into a PCI multi-port card.

I'm not a techie with firewire matters and here's the punch line--2/3 of the movie (200GB) is on that drive. I am getting close to panic.

Any suggestions?

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 5/7/2005, 5:35 PM
First, when you turn off external drives, you should always do so AFTER you have clicked on the "safely remove hardware" button that is in the system tray near your clock. If you don't do this, files can be left open on the drive.

However, the drive should still be recognized.

To fix this problem:

1. Shut EVERYTHING down completely. Full power off to the computer, all peripherals and, of course, the drive.

2. Boot up the computer.

3. Make sure your firewire drive is disconnected from the computer (it is still off at this point).

4. Turn on the firewire drive.

5. After the drive has spun up, connect the firewire cable.

Wait about 30 seconds.

Make SURE you don't have anything else connected. I sometimes have problems when my camera is connected, even though it is not daisy chained. Other firewire peripherals can cause lockups, etc.

If this doesn't work, then you might want to install the Firewire patch (this link is for Windows XP, Service Pack 1. If you have SP2, there is a different patch.

Firewire 1394 Solutions
cbrillow wrote on 5/7/2005, 5:41 PM
It's not clear to me whether you're using the firewire or USB port, but have you tried using the opposite? I had a situation where my firewire bridge toasted, but I was able to access the drive with the USB connection...
Liam_Vegas wrote on 5/7/2005, 5:43 PM
In addition to everything John said... if that fails... try connecting the drive using USB.

I have 3 external firewire/USB drives... and I switch them between four PC's here. On occasion I have had a problem where one of the drives cannot be mounted in one of the PC's. My situation is a little more tricky than yours in that I have 23 video drives that I slide in and out of removeable trays that are sitting in my external drives. I sort of forgive my computers the occasional "fit" when I am swapping drives around the way that I do. Whenever I encounter this problem I end up doing full shutdowns of the system and that usually fixes the issue. On one occasion I had to swap the external drive around as well. I was never quite sure what caused the problem anyway... but with a few random changes I would always get the things to be recognized again.

By the way... for me... I always use the USB connection... as in my experience I have had far more problems with firewire attached external drives than with USB. YMMV

Also....I always practice "safe" removal of drives. When I want to swap in/out any of my drives I do the "safe shutdown" thing - power off the external drive... remove the HD... slide in the next one... power up the drive again.
vitalforce wrote on 5/8/2005, 7:30 PM
Sorry about the late acknowledgement but thanks all--the advice worked. Panic is gone, video files are back. Yes.

I am using a firewire PCI 3-port card, and I think there's a unique way to accidentally throw a WD external drive out of sync with the PCI card, since there are two ways to activate the 'Safe Shutdown' button. You can just press & release it, and it will blink until the drive sorts out any pending files--same type of operation as the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon. On the other hand, if you turn off the computer with the drives still on, you can press the safe shutdown button and hold it down for 5 seconds while the button light blinks, then it shuts down.

What I learned NOT do to is press and hold the blinking button while the computer is on, i.e. while the drive is trying to tell me it's still sequencing itself for safe shutdown. That seems to throw off the drive's communication with that unique WD firewire driver that has to be installed with these new WD drives.

Anyway, the solution was to turn everything off, then back on again in a specific sequence as suggested, plugging in the firewire cable last. (I prefer firewire over USB because it's less load on the CPU.) Whew. Thanks again, guys.
vicmilt wrote on 5/9/2005, 3:13 PM
Now... lesson learned...
backup your VEG file RIGHT NOW on another drive (even C: is ok - this is a temp backup) or CD-ROM, D: drive - whatever.

and do that every night - you can throw the old ones away.
Then the most you will lose is the redigitizing time.
v.

Grazie wrote on 5/9/2005, 11:58 PM
Vic? aint that the truth! ! ! - ho yes . . . how much a CD platter? 20p here in uk? My edit time/cost? . . . wotz less than a no-brainer? . .

Grazie