Hi Glen.

There must be something wrong with the onboard FireWire controler on the ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe. On mine, it simply cannot establish connection with my XL1s (same camera and cable work with other computers). I'v sent an email to ASUS about it.

Best regards,
Arnaldo

I think with mine it's a specific coorelation between the Promise Raid Controller and the IEEE. Reason being I was able to capture fine to any drive connected to my SATA Intel ports...just not the two SATA Promise Ports.

Your motherboard has a good chance of being similar to my Asus A7V8X - Asus set the onboard RAID controller to share the 1394 controller. If so, that is your problem. Two high speed devices trying to read and write data at the same time, doesn't work too well with DV.

This is most likely your problem. The only way you havea chance of fixing this problem without spending money, would be to turn off ACPI IRQ handeling in your motherboard BIOS, then reinstall windows from scratch. Yes, I said reinstall windows from scratch. Why? ACPI IRQ handlers are installed during a fresh Windows install, not afterward. You can't remove them after a Windows install, or else Windows gets fubared. What you want, is to avoid using ACPI, and configure each device seperately, so your RAID and 1394 controllers utilize seperate IRQs.

I've never bothered, because a) it looks like the IRQ sharing of the RAID and 1394 controller is hardcoded, and b) I have another 1394 port on my Audigy2 Platinum anyways, so I use that.

If you bought a dedicated seperate 1394 card, your problem will be eliminated, but I don't know if you're willing to do that.

Yeah I'm just going to stick with the IEEE on the Audigy 2. Ironicly enough I chose to first try and capture with onboard IEEE to avoid going through the PCI interface (via Audigy Sound Card). Oh well. I my as well go in the bios and disable onboard IEEE all together as I have my onboard parallel and game ports.

Except for the motherboard (I have a ASUS P4PE) I am having exactly the same problem with exactly the same workaround.
My system is a ASUS P4PE, with 1GB RAM, Pentium 4 3.06GHz, 60GB ATA Boot Drive, 120GB ATA Export drive, 2x120GB Seagate SATA Material drives(RAID 0 via on-board Raid chip), Audigy 2 board, Sony DRU-500A DVD RW.
I can capture without dropping a frame to my export drive. But try the RAID drives a I drop about 200 frames a minute.
I am going to keep working on a solution (when my material drives are not full) and looking for a solution on the net. In the mean time the workaround works, but why is the question.

TTFN

These are like $8 on pricewatch.com ?

They're not terribly difficult to install on Windows XP as it has the drivers you need. It's plug and play.

My firewire pci card has 3 ports...if I connected 3 external hd's to them would they work in parallel or in series?