On the verge of giving up

I received a Belkin IEEE1394 card in the mail this morning and with great expectation I promptly installed it in the PC, and hooked it up to one of the spare power connectors internally.

The PC booted fine, discovered the new hardware and we were away (or so I thought).

Plugged in the iPod. Nothing! No bubble telling me new hardware had been detected, no change in the hardware devices tree, nothing at all! iTunes says there's no iPod connected.

Plugged in the camcorder. Nothing (as above). Studio 9 says it can't initialise a 1394 device.

Getting desperate, I tried the cable which came with the new board, disabled the on-board 1394 device in the BIOS and even booted up in Linux to see if I'd get any more joy there. Alas, no. Neither the iPod or camcorder are recognised, so it's back to square one :(

The only thing I can think to do now is to try both devices in someone else's computer - preferably someone who has had their 1394 port(s) working.

Posted on: Jan 20, 2005

Posted by: tdw

Category: General

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Comments:

I assume from your post you're playing with Windows XP. Contrary to earlier comments about XP-SP2 I've not encountered any issues with SP2. I use an external 2.5" disk, an iPod and a Sony mini-DV camcorder successfully with a number of WinXP PC's (our home one - a Vaio desktop, my work Fujitsu Siemens laptop and another Vaio desktop). Have you looked in the XP device manager applet to see what state the FireWire interface is in? If you enter "devmgmt.msc" in the Start Menu/Run dialog it'll bring up the Device Manager and you should see IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers. The Texas Instruments controller is most common. If your board hasn't been detected (big yellow '?') it'll be necessary to have Device Mgr scan for hw changes in the Action menu. I believe my Vaio actually uses an Asus motherboard so that might be reassuring! BTW - my interest in Sun & Solaris is professional: I run VMware as a means of getting at Solaris 10 and Linux on these WinXP PCs hence I track blogs.sun.com.

Posted by Don Thompson on January 20, 2005 at 01:45 PM GMT #

Thanks for the info Don.

Device Manager shows up the 1394 host bus controller ok - I don't have any devices show up as "unknown" or with the yellow "?".

I'm wondering if a strange coincidence has left me with a faulty iPod FireWire cable and a bad DV port on the camcorder.

The frustration is getting at me now :(

Posted by Trevor Watson on January 20, 2005 at 02:09 PM GMT #

I've had the same problem on my Thinkpad, with a PCMCIA firewire card. It didn't work at all ... I searched around on Apples pages, and it turns out that it just doesn't work in some cases. I have no idea why.

Posted by Foobar on January 20, 2005 at 02:11 PM GMT #

Following Don's comment my suggestion is to get the latest XP SP2 download and upgrade the PC. Another suggestion is avoid drivers(or use as last resort) that come bundled with devices since they often create conflicts(Lexmark is a prime culprit) with other devices and the OS itself.

Posted by 208.237.173.72 on January 20, 2005 at 07:44 PM GMT #

I'm having the exact same problem with my pc105 and firewire - i just can't get my computer to recognise that anything's plugged in. From doing a quick search, it looks like we're not the only ones having this problem, but as yet, I haven't come accross anyone with a solution. Actually, one guy says that you just need to remove the memory stick and then it's miraculously recognised but this didn't work for me. If you have any luck, let me know - i'd really appreciate it. Tom.

Posted by tomston on January 21, 2005 at 04:40 PM GMT #

Thanks for the comment Tom. When I searched, I couldn't find anyone else with the same problem, although I have to admit that wading through pages of adverts for Sony camcorders may have blinded me to some essential reading.

I'll try taking the memory stick out and see if that helps. If not, and given your comments, I might think about changing cameras to one I can use for DV!

Posted by Trevor Watson on January 21, 2005 at 05:12 PM GMT #

SOLVED IT!!!!! Turns out that (for me) it's just an XP problem - turns out that the version of XP i'm using (think it's SP2) has got a stupid glitch in it that somehow stops firewire from working. I found (after great difficulty) the right patch, which I'll try to e-mail to you in a minute, and sure enough, after running it and resetting my firewire 'woke up' and now i'm happily editing away with my sony camcorder. Hope it works for you - I'm pretty sure it must be the same problem. Best of luck- Tom.

Posted by tom on January 24, 2005 at 11:16 AM GMT #

okay, call me dumb but i can't see your e-mail, presumably because you chose not to show it on the site. Or i could just be thick. anyway, e-mail me if you want the patch and i'll send it to you. I'm not at my e-mail very often so it might take a day before i get back to you but i'll do my best. Cheers, Tom.

Posted by tom on January 24, 2005 at 11:24 AM GMT #

Thanks for the update on this Tom. I've emailed your Yahoo! address with my email address. Alternatively, it should be at the end of this comment.

Posted by Trevor Watson on January 24, 2005 at 01:15 PM GMT #

Hey Tom - you couldn't sent me that email too. I also have a problem with my wife's iPod on XP SP2 (firewire and USB)

Posted by John Bayliss on March 08, 2005 at 06:05 AM GMT #

Please I need the patch too. My email is chrmsilver@yahoo.co.in

Posted by Vidyut on June 27, 2005 at 05:02 PM BST #

I need to clear something up - i don't have the patch anymore and i have moved countries - i am now living in japan, but i still receive emails on this subject asking for help now and again. My advice is that if you do have this problem, it is probably beacuse of the glitch that keeps the firewire ports asleep in xp sp2. i would simply go to the windows download site and get the latest patch for sp2 or upgrade to sp3 or something like that. i am pretty confident this will sort it out. good luck, everyone. Tom.

Posted by Tom on July 17, 2006 at 12:40 PM BST #

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