God Please Help, Going Nuts !!!! It Shouldnt Be This Hard !!!!

[convbmw]

Hello All,


This is driving me crazy and it just doesn't make sense.

I have 2 brand new identical usb / firewire external enclosures, (nextstar 3) with brand new identical hard drives, (seagate barracuda/ 300gb) . Here are my symptoms. I will address each enclosure as 1 and 2.

When booting both up #1 shows up in my computer, #2 doesn’t. both are connected via firewire cables and firewire card in my PC.

When I shut down and reverse the start up order, #2 first and then #1 second……. #1 doesn’t show up.

Basically only one drive is showing up and the one that is showing is always the 1st one that is booted up. When I connect USB, they both show up.

Here is what I have trouble shot.

Different cables, swapped master and slave on the jumpers on the hard drive, removed firewire card and replaced it back in AND just tired new FW card.

All of this is not making any sense.

God, please help. I could run USB but really.....why would I want to do that ??

[Platypus]

Welcome to WinDrivers, convbmw.

Your problem may be that they are new and identical...

The Firewire interface registers devices by their GUID (Globally Unique IDentifier). Unfortunately, in practice there is nothing to ensure GUIDs will actually be unique, other than it being a 128bit number, so there's a huge range to choose from. If you've been unlucky enough to get 2 devices that happen to have the same GUID, they cannot both operate on Firewire at the same time.

Can you try them on another computer with Firewire to see if the same thing happens?

If it does, then this is probably the cause. In this case, if they're new, would the supplier possibly allow you to change one of the drives to another brand, or if a local supplier, try different units of the same brand to find two that have different GUIDs, and you can demonstrate to your own satisfaction that they will operate concurrently?

Alternatively, the drives will probably both show up if one is connected Firewire, the other USB? If so, does your application successfully allow them to be used in this configuration? Unless we're talking Firewire 800, the main advantage of Firewire is iso-synchronous operation, which allows Firewire to have a protocol to guarantee streaming priority. Unless both drives need this, for video or audio streaming, one may serve you quite well on USB.

[convbmw]

Welcome to WinDrivers, convbmw.

Your problem may be that they are new and identical...

The Firewire interface registers devices by their GUID (Globally Unique IDentifier). Unfortunately, in practice there is nothing to ensure GUIDs will actually be unique, other than it being a 128bit number, so there's a huge range to choose from. If you've been unlucky enough to get 2 devices that happen to have the same GUID, they cannot both operate on Firewire at the same time.

Can you try them on another computer with Firewire to see if the same thing happens?

If it does, then this is probably the cause. In this case, if they're new, would the supplier possibly allow you to change one of the drives to another brand, or if a local supplier, try different units of the same brand to find two that have different GUIDs, and you can demonstrate to your own satisfaction that they will operate concurrently?

Alternatively, the drives will probably both show up if one is connected Firewire, the other USB? If so, does your application successfully allow them to be used in this configuration? Unless we're talking Firewire 800, the main advantage of Firewire is iso-synchronous operation, which allows Firewire to have a protocol to guarantee streaming priority. Unless both drives need this, for video or audio streaming, one may serve you quite well on USB.

My Man !!!

Second person to tell me this. You were much more elaborate though in your description.

Here is what the other person said.

"If they are identical, they most likely have the same identifier, and thus will only boot 'once'... This happened alot on the early FW/USB combo chips (like the crappy PL3507).. you might be able to flash upgrade the firmware."

I think that this might be the issue. I BET that the supplier wont take accountability on this one BUT.....I am willing to find out.

Seems to make sense. If anyone wants to chime in please feel free to do so.

thank you so so much.