Thanks. I tried... right now I'm rending to another drive, that works OK. I opened two more instances of Vegas and both complain they can't write to the removable drive, yet every other application I try has no problems. Weird.

what kind of drive is this?

Just a regular IDE ATA/100 drive in a removable drawer.

Is Vegas looking for the wrong drive letter perhaps?

Nope, I have it set to drive "Z" and both systems see it as that. What's odd, is Vegas sees it too...usually, just now for the second time it doesn't want to write to it. Vegas brings up the render window, it looks like it is about to start, then it pops up the can't write error. I doubt it is a Windows thing because all my other software work fine reading and writing to the drive. Got me stumped what's going on.

I can pull the drive drawer out of PC #2 and put it back in PC #1 and Vegas has no problem writing to it while in #1. But twice so far it doesn't want to render a file while in PC #2, yet it will read the "veg" file and all the source files that are on "Z" regarless what PC it is in.

BillyBoy:
Don't totally rule out windows as the culprit. Also, get a very large magnifying
glass and a very bright light and examine each contact on the drive and
each contact on the receiving jack on PC2. I would bet one of them is bent,
broken, or slightly pushed into the jack. Do not think logically about Vegas
reading the drive for veg files or reading the drive for "Z". This is
my .02 cents. My system is SCSI and and occurrances like you describe are
not uncommon. One slightly pushed in pin can drive you nuts.

James J. Kizak

Billy, try rendering something to an internal drive then going back to z.
Is there software that exist on PC2 that isn't on PC1?
Try a different 1394 cable?

Craig H.

A couple of thoughts:

1. Is the drive overheating? A bit far-fetched if it is only happening with Vegas.
2. Are you using an 80 strand data cable as you should with an ATA 66/100 drive.
3. Do you have extra device drivers loaded? (boot into safe mode and take a look in the device manager to see)
4. Does the bios recognize the drive first? If it does try setting the drive letter to None.
5. Norton Utilities used to have random problems with removable drives. Don't know if they resolved them in more recent versions.

John

Thanks guys for the suggestions. Vegas reads the veg file and project source files off this drive correctly and everything is as it should be on the timeline on both PC's. In fact I played the whole project back form within Vegas before trying to render it on PC #2 which is why is seems like such a "crazy" problem that doesn't make sense.

Why in the heck can Vegas "read" from the "Z" drive and not "write" to it? The obvious answer would be somehow one or more files got marked read only, but I checked, and they aren't. So unless Windows is doing something behind my back, I'm stuck.

Maybe I'm going to order a Bill Gates voodoo doll.

I'm in the middle of a long render, so I can't really play around with it till probably mid day tomorrow or later. I'll let you know what happens if anything.

Shouldn't you assign your CD Rom drive to "z"? Also, what is in your autoexec.bat and config.sys files (if any) with respect to drive mapping?

Well things just got worse. The file in question finished rendering. So as usual, I next did a 'print to tape' or I should say I tried to. It stopped about half way through. Remember this is now rendering from the "good" drive "C". I next tried to copy the rendered file from "C" to "Z" and about half way into the transfer I got both a data error 'cyclic redundancy check' and Windows delayed write failed messages.

My guess is since both the source files and the VEG files are on "Z" even though Vegas seems to be able to read the files and play the entire project without problem it can't write to the "Z" drive, which on the surface would suggest the drive is defective...another f...... Maxtor drive.

I next did a chkdsk on the "Z" drive and a complete surface scan and no errors were reported. The drive had been freshly defragemented and is only a few months old.

Drive electronics are complex. Try swapping drives and enclosures, to see if the enclosure connections are at fault. Otherwise, I think you are right--the drive is misbehaving.

Hi BillyBoy-

I have not read every single thread on this topic, but...

HD overheat in those drawers?
Try bypassing the drawers and plug direct to the HD?

Just a wild guess.

For windows XP:
Right click My Computer then select manage, this will
bring up another
window.

Select Disk Management on the left pane. Right pane will
shows up all drives
connected to the system

Right click on your new drive, if it's a new drive you may
need to
Initialize first before you can make a partitions and
format them.

After disk has been initialized, right click and select
Create Partition,
follow the wizard until finished. (remember to check quick
format, otherwise
it will take quite a long time to format a large drive)

Also in this window you can arrange the drive letters for
all drives and
CDROM (except XP's boot drive)

I don't know if or not it is the drive acting up. I find it odd that only Vegas can't write to it, then a hour later it does, then don't again. Still rendering off the original problem files, so didn't put it back in PC #1 to see if it acts up there. While it is doing that I've moved several 5-10 GB files to and from the "Z" drive and it handles it without any problem. So...???? Maybe this one or more of the source files got corrupted and that's all that's wrong. I wish Vegas would be more specific instead of just saying it can't write to the drive. Why can't it????? What file or files is it accessing when trying to write to the drive???????

If not, then probably either the drive or the IDE card it is connected to is bad. Since it is a newer faster ADA 133 drive it is on an external controler. My PC #1 has a 133 controller built into the motherboard, so that should at least rule out one problem. At least in PC #1 I can drop down from mode 6 to mode 5. Can't running off the external IDE controller since you can't get at its BIOS which is just overlayed on top of everything at boot time.

Bill,
The Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller had a windows driver update in November:
http://www.promise.com/support/file/driver/Ultra133TX2%20windows%202.00.0.39%20logo%20driver.zip

Is that what you have?

What is the boot sequence specified in your mainboard's bios? With a controller it should be SCSI/ATA. In other words, the mainboard's bios doesn't recognize the HDD when a controller is used. The bios of the controller does instead. Since in effect it acts as a SCSI device, you should boot SCSI/ATA.

It would be easier if you could list your complete hardware configuration, OS version, Raid setup?, cabling for drives and channels, etc. for Machine #2.

John

Thanks for the heads up John. I'll install the update Thursday.

I've got things set up a little weird. Because I'm kind of a fanantic with swapping drives in and out in removable drawers I have a seperate IDE card in each computer.

However the unusual part is the 2nd controller only controls the removable drives, so both PC #1 and PC #2 each have a pair of IDE drives run of the motherboard and its BIOS, with the extra IDE card only active if there happens to be one or more "removable" drives installed. Since both the motherboard and the extra IDE card each have two IDE channels, I run all of it. In other words I have a master/slave drive off IDE channel 1 on the motherboard with the DVD/burner/player on the 2nd IDE.

That allows me to have 4 removable drawers two on PC #1, two on PC #2 each as a master/slave off the extra IDE card. This has worked great, allowing me to swap drives around freely. Been like this for at least a couple months without any problems so I doubt that's it.

I'm back at square one as far as trying to understand what happened.

I now have my "Z" drive back in PC #1. All attempts to render from the 'problem' source file works fine... on PC #1 and fail every time on PC #2. That would on the surface suggest the file is OK and the drive as well and there must be a problem with either PC 2's 2nd IDE controller card or some BIOS or hardware issue.

But wait...

I was going to reformat just to be safe even though Windows XP reports the NTSF file structure as healthy. Before doing that I looked at the files on "Z" from Windows Explorer with settings to show details. I play the suspected bad 'source' file. It plays fine without a single glitch. Ditto for the newly rendered file made on PC #2.

However...

If I switch to thumbnail view in Explorer, it immediately crashes Windows Explorer. I repeat, going back to detail view... no problem. Switch back again to thumbnail view, immediate crash. I reinstall "Z" on PC #2. Again Explorer crashes. Again, put "Z" back into PC #1, move the suspeced file to one of my other internal drives on the motherboard's IDE controller. Same thing. The file itself plays fine... if I play it in Vegas or Media Player but Windows Explorer if set to thumbnail view crashes every time indicating the file is corrupt. I move the file elsewhere, repeat the Windows Explorer test with other AVI/MPG files and thumbnail view works properly showing the first frame as it should.

So what the heck is happening?

For every project I do, I ALWAYS play through the original source files FIRST to be sure they are OK. So to start out all appearances suggest the source file (was only one) for this project was healthly.

Vegas during the editing stage reported no problems, I had no problems editing. Yet something happened to the file during the editing process. For reasons I don't know it simply refuses to' print to tape' on PC #2, (Vegas keeps saying can't write) but Vegas will 'print to tape' from PC #1 for the same file every time. As I said, the file appears OK and plays fine, either with Vegas off the timeline or with Media Player yet everytime Windows Explorer attempts to open it as it must in thumbnail view it crashes regardless what drive or PC it tries from.

This don't really explain why Vegas can read the soucre files OK and write to the drive on PC #1 rendering it out as 'print to tape' but can't using the same file on the same hard drive when installed on PC #2 and instead time after time keep reporting a can't write error, preventing it from 'printing to tape.'

Ok...here's my 2 cents worth (YMMV). I too use a hard drive in a tray (mine is a 120mb maxtor) for my video files. I had a baffling experience similar to yours at the time I purchased the new maxtor. The old drive had worked perfectly in both pc's but the new drive would be flakey, sometimes, in one of the pc's. To cut to the chase, the problem turned out to be the speed at which the tray electronics could/would operate. Until then, I had not known that trays are rated for the ide bus speed. I purchased a new tray which claimed it was capable of handling much faster (don't recall the values now), and bingo..problem was solved..and more importantly...stayed solved. It has never happened again. So...I'm wondering if the combination of the new speedy drive, with the old tray, swapped between 2 pc's could be causing difficulty for the tray electronics?

Keep us posted...I'm sure it's enormously frustrating.

Yep, its annoying alright. Got my Bill Gates voodoo doll on backorder. :-)

Both drawers are rated as ATA Ultra/100/133 as is the drive and the controller cards. I would write it off to just a corrupt file, but this is the second time its happened, so don't know if its Windows or Vegas somehow that's corrupting the file. I doubt it is bad hardware or it should happen more often you would think.

Hi BillyBoy-

Try losing the trays to see what happens. I had overheat problems, as I suggested to you in the above post, there may be other problems. None of my hard drives are mounted, just plug in the ATA and power cables direct and see what happens. Possibly, nothing, on the other hand it is a cheap try at a solution.

I did try taking the drive out of the drawer. Didn't matter. I unpluged, repluged the silly thing a dozen times and really looked close at the connector pins, the drive electronics, all that. I was going to run Spinrite on it, but thought better of it, being a 160GB drive it would take days to complete and I doubt it would show anything. I'll let you guys know if another file on the same drive does the same thing. Like I said, this is the second time Vegas couldn't write to that drive, but only on PC #2 and even now I got about 50GB worth of files being copied from another drive to my "z" drive just to see if I can make it crash, and I can't.

Its just that I hate to keep using a "bad" drive if it really is bad, so I'm trying to prove or disprove its the drive.

The one thing I like to do and can't is slow down the BIOS from mode 6 to mode 5 or even 4 and see if that does anything. Anyone know how to do that with a second IDE controller card? It isn't like normal BIOS where you can go into setup and change something, at least I don't see any way and didn't find a way on the web. The second BIOS just loads, says it detects such and such drive and its off to the races and sets the mode based on they type drive that is connected. I tried slower drives. so I know the second BIOS card will drop modes down as low as mode 3, but it seems to be just auto detect and no way to force it to run slower.