HELP!!! 1394 drives and deck have vanished from PC DV Pro!!!
 

I'm in a bind - the client is coming in to screen rough cuts tomorrow - Wednesday - I spent two hours on the phone with DELL Tech Support (they gave up since it's a 1394 issue). Here's the problem:

We are running two Avid DV Pro systems on Dell Precision 620 systems. One system has been up for almost two years; the other we put together last Summer. Both have external 1394 ProMax drives; both have Sony DSR11 DVCam 1394 decks; both have over a GIG of RAM. In short - great systems, no problems until today.

I got a call from one of my editors that the "1394 drives had vanished"; at the same time the other editor was complaining he could not get the DSR11 to appear - not in Avid, not in Windows. I was my day off but off I went.

I replaced the 1394 card with a new one. At Dell's suggestion I placed back the old one but in a different slot. We did a system restore. Nothing has worked. Please HELP!!!!

One small clue that might have no bearing - one of the editors tried to connect his system to the DA-Max transcoder that is across the room and which also services the other system. The editor of the system that is usually connected to the DA-Max (for digitizig from Beta) noticed that "the drives from the other system appeared in his machine" and he "deleted them" - I don't know if this somehow altered something in a 1394 network I didn't mean to establish.

Please - ANY help - even a small lead will be most helpful.

Does anyone know anyone in New York City that might be able to come in on short notice?

Thank you!

If you bought the drives from Promax couldn't you try calling them?

2- Anyways, you can disassemble the FW enclosure to get at the drive inside. Make sure you are grounded first.

Once you get the drive out you can hook it up just like any other ATA hard drive.

3- Avoid hotswapping FW drives to avoid damaging the firewire ports. If you want to be safe, then power everything on/off before swapping.

Also make sure you use good cable and don't insert the FW connectors backwards (which is actually possible).

4- I don't use FW drives myself so someone else might be able to help out here more.

The problem is not with the drives since they work in other systems. I've tried changing the cables.

Good try and I appreciate the response but I suspect the problem is deeper and not as obvious - but maybe I'm wrong (I cetainly hope I am.)

Thank you.

Do you have an ieee1394 bus controller in device manager? are there any red crosses in device manager?

I take it that these are Win XP machines? if so when the device is connected does it appear in My computer (when your deck is conencted a Sony device should appear?

You might need to re-install Win XP. Or you could try some of these: http://forum.matrox.com/rt2000/Forum36/HTML/000001.html Although it is mentioned for Matrox hardware, Number 4 might help?

Cheers,

Ed

I'm a bit worried about the "the drives from the other system
appeared in his machine and he deleted them" line.

It is a common thing that when you hook up computers through
some 1394 device they can see EVERYTHING that is attached to
the 1394 chain. Even if it is on another PC. This can get you into
trouble with drives indeed.

The part I'm most worried about is the "he deleted them" part.
How did he delete drives from Windows? The only way this can
be done to the best of my knowledge is to:

1) unplug the hardware (no problem)

2) un-assign a drive letter (no problem)

3) erase the partitions or format the drive (BIG problem)

So this is the first thing you need resolving I think. You say the
drive appears fine in another machine. Have you tested this
AFTER this problem started (and the guy "deleted the drives")
or BEFORE?

If it is after then this deleting doesn't make sense and all should
be well. If it is before, go test it NOW.

With that having been said and the drive working fine I'm thinking
one of the following things:

1) virus

2) windows update

Is there any chance those machines have automatic updates
turned on and have installed updates from the internet (which
I personally would not do automatically for critical machines)?

You can go to add/remove software to see what was installed
and hopefully when. It might be some little windows update that
is causing all this mayhem.

As Ed pointed out it is also very important to check out the device
manager to see if:

1) your 1394 card(s) is/are being detected without any conflicts etc.

2) the device you plugin to the 1394 card are appearing somewhere in that list as well

<<<-- Originally posted by Ed Smith : Do you have an ieee1394 bus controller in device manager? are there any red crosses in device manager?

I take it that these are Win XP machines? if so when the device is connected does it appear in My computer (when your deck is conencted a Sony device should appear?>>>

Taking the questions in order -- yes (ieee1394 appears in the device manager); no (no red crosses - appear working properly) ; no (the devices do not appear in My Computer" - although often the "ding dong" sound denoting a new conection does sound off but nothing appears)

Oz

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : I'm a bit worried about the "the drives from the other system
appeared in his machine and he deleted them" line. -->>>

Rob,

I am also concerned with the "deleting them" action. That particular editor is brand new to XDV editing. I had supplied the other system with a long ieee1394 cable ONLY to access the DA-Max across the room. In my mind, that cable would have been connected directly to the DA-Max and nothing else. Obviously this is not what was done. Since I wasn't there, I will need to ask for details when I get to the war zone ... er.. office.

I do think you are in the right track and considering our time difference we might be able to get back in touch later in the day.

Oz

This has happened to me often---Normally the culprit is the controler inside the firewire drive enclosure---What I do in these circumstances is toss the box and get a new one. Recently I started buying Granite DIgital enclosures and so far so good. I would stay away from the ADS enclosures--I have gone through a couple. I'm in the NYC area too!.

David,

Not quite the suggestion that makes me feel better. ;-) I'ts not the drives - if it were all six of them would have gone south all at once; also the systems won't even recognize the DSR11 deck we have plugged into a separate 1394 board.

For now our solution is no solution. We were able to "borrow" a Symphony from another room (not ours) and transfer most of what we needed for one of our projects.

We gave a call to VCA and they are sending a technician over in the morning. Even though I explained it is NOT an Avid problem (Windows won't find any 1394 hardware) - my fear is that they will send an Avid tech who will be just as baffled as I am. Fingers crossed.

I fear you might have to re-install Win XP.

Do you have anything else connected to the other firewire ports when you connect your devices?

I hadn't responded sooner because things are back to normal... sort of. The "repairs" left me with more questions and not quite a perfect system. Let me explain.

Yes, the incident that caused the major problem was most probably the connection of one system to the DA-Max while it (the DA-Max) was connected to the second system. But that alone does not explain why we hadn't experienced the problems we are currently experiencing sooner. According to the very knowledgeable tech guy from VCA, we cannot have so many 1394 drives connected to one system. We especially cannot connect a few external drives AND a deck and expect it to work.

In many ways, he is correct. The "solution” was to connect only two drives per 1394 port . Since we have 6 ProMax drives on one system and a Firewire card with 3 ports, we connected two drives per port - 2; 2; 1. But that leaves the problem of where to connect the deck. He suggested the second 1394 card be placed in a slot as far away from the first one as possible. Well, that's not possible since the only slots where the 1394 cards fit are next to each other. So at the moment I have the DSR11 deck connected to a second 1394 card which is next to the other.

This is causing a significant number of "read ahead" failures. A solution I found was to turn off the drives I'm not using. This does minimize the problems - instead of constant errors and Avid crashes, we are now suffering from occasional 1394 drives going AWOL and having to re-boot the system to get them back.

Are you beginning to see why I now have so many questions? Why is all this happening? How am I supposed to connect a few external 1394 drives AND a 1394 deck to a system and suffer no problems? Why did these problems not pop up sooner? What are the limitations of 1394? Are there ways around this? IS a 1394 switcher recommended?

So there you have it. I have more questions but these are all for now. Any suggestions will be most appreciated. I have learned more about 1394 in the past three days than in the past 4 years. I know there has to be a way to make this standard a solid and dependable one, especially when a product like Avid XDV is based on it.

Oh, and by the way, the incident seems to have fried the 1394 port on the DSR11 which we bought just a month ago. But since we lost the 1394 port on a DSR1500 a long time ago, this might be an indication that not all was going as smoothly as we thought.

P.S. >>> This is a great forum. I visit many tech forums, but DVInfo is the only one where I really feel among friends. I post questions here knowing I will get a thoughtful response - maybe not always a correct one, but intelligent nevertheless. Chris and the gang are to be commended for maintaining one of the most serious, friendly, and useful sites around.

To avoid damaging firewire ports, do not hotswap any devices. Power stuff down before changing things. Also be sure to use good cable and not to insert the connectors backwards.

2- It seems like your firewire devices are conflicting with each other.

You might want to try getting or moving to internal storage instead. It is cheaper, faster, and more reliable. You can get an ATA controller card and put a lot of hard drives inside one computer as long as space, cooling, and power don't restrict you.

That seems to be a bit of hocus pocus IMO, although it might have a kernel of validity in it. Depending on the slots you put your firewire cards in, they may be forced to share an IRQ interrupt (which may or may not be bad).

To check this, go to (Win XP)
start --> run --> msinfo32
system summary --> hardware resources --> conflicts/sharing

Glenn,

No hot swaping here. In fact I have everything set to optimize performance and not easy removal. I've instructed all the editors to turn off devices and even the whole system before removing them.

I can't detect any conflicting devices. I'll check again when back in the office on Tuesday.

Tell me more about ATA controllers. Both of my systems are pretty much loaded as is. I know they are maxed out in IDE slots. For one of them I had to forego an internal Zip.

Still, I would like to hear more from someone about this 1394 limit as it is being explained to me. I opted to invest in 1394 external devices because they are cheap, easily available, portable, and, at least int he case of ProMax, reliable. But no where have I read of the problems 1394 can cause when used extensively with editing applications.

By the way, by moving the controlers away from each other, the tech guy explained that although there are two slots for cards, the Dell Precision 620 "sees" them as one. (I think he meant what you describe - sharing the same IRQ.) His suggestion was to place the second card "on the other side of the RAID card." The problem is that the cards don't fit there - at least not fully and the ports come to within an inch of the rear opening.

You can get SATA or PATA controller cards to allow more internal storage.

The card itself uses the PCI interface like your firewire card. Some of the higher end ones will use the PCI-X or PCI-E interfaces, which your workstation may have.

PATA = parallel ATA, also know as ATA, IDE, ATA33 ATA66 ATA100 and ATA133. It uses the big ribbon cables.
SATA = serial ATA. It uses smaller cables and you can only have one drive on each controller as opposed to 2 with PATA. The smaller cables are nice if you want lots of drives in your system.

The SATA/PATA controller cards will add more SATA/controllers. Here is an example:

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduc...103-136&depa=0

So in your situation above, an additional controller card could give you an additional (P)ATA controller and allow you to put in the Zip drive. Btw, Zip drives tend to fail... see http://grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm
Then again, CD-Rs and hard drives fail too.

I have no idea what he's talking about. Your computer can tell the difference. IRQ sharing can happen but your computer "seeing" both firewire cards as the same is not a very good analogy.

I think you've already figured out what your problem is- the combination of firewire devices you are using do not work well together.

Thank you Glenn. You've been most helpful.

>>I think you've already figured out what your problem is- the combination of firewire devices you are using do not work well together.<<<

I certainly have - BUT what IS so unusual about using a 1394 deck with 1394 drives? And why is the number of 1394 drives significant? I'm puzzled by this since AVID is basing its DV Pro system on just this assumption. Are we all expected to get Mojo to take care of the deck input and store all media internally? This makes some sense but not when the thrust of the advertising is geared to using DV Pro with laptops!

‘Tis a puzzlement.

Hold on, you have Mojo on the firewire card too?

You should read Avid's support documents on it, Mojo is very picky. It seems that Mojo needs a lot of bandwidth as your computer has to move uncompressed video into and out of it. It would probably not do that well sharing bandwidth with other firewire devices.

From what I heard: Decks and DV cameras use the FW100 protocol, which moves 100 megaBITs per second instead of 400. There might be some conflict when switching between FW100 and FW400 transfer modes. Some people on Final Cut forums report problems with a deck and FW drive connected to the same FW card and success when adding another card. And some other people have a deck and FW drive on the same card and capture fine.

Another possible explanation: There are some manufacturers that deviate from the standards for the interfaces the products use (firewire standard = IEEE 1394a). For example, the Promise RAID controller card "hogs" the interface (PCI). This lets it do slightly better in benchmarks, but can/will create problems if there are other devices on the interface (like sound cards). Or in many cases the manufacturer just isn't very good at making their products follow standards well.

Something similar may be happening here.

Well I'm sure a computer engineer could explain things to you, although that doesn't really help you.

They market it... but if you read the Mojo compatibility article you will start to get unhappy with Avid as it becomes very difficult to find a laptop that is compatible with Mojo (following the compatibility article).

I suppose there's a mild correlation between the number of FW drives and encountering problems. By adding more drives (especially of different brands) you add complication.

Some people are able to daisy chain a lot of drives... so 2 drives/port is not a hard and fast rule that I would necessarily follow.

>>Hold on, you have Mojo on the firewire card too?<<

Definitely NOT. I have also read the not too encouraging Mojo articles and I've decided to wait it out until something better comes along.

Can you recomment a IEEE1394 specific site that can be of help? I know of some but they are either standards definintions sites or not very coherent.

Sorry, I don't know any good sites except for one that talks about damaging firewire ports.

In theory you should be able to hook up 127 devices. I'm
wondering whether this is some bandwidth problem on either
the firewire busses or the PCI bus (more likely).

It is puzzling indeed that this problem didn't started happening
until recently.

As I pointed out I really feel we should try to get as clear as
possible what happened before this problem arose. I'm really
curious still what happened when the other guy deleted those
drives.

Carefully try to trace back to what happened in as much detail
as possible. Since it has worked it should be able to work again
now as well.

Otherwise you might want to try and narrow down when the
most problems start happening. Which specific drives on which
controllers or how many drives on a controller etc.

When the tech guy said your computer sees multiple cards as
one I think he was referring to the fact that the computer creates
one large firewire bus over multiple cards.

For example: if you have two firewire cards in your PC and you
hook up a drive to one card and another computer to the other
card the other computer will see the drive as well (under XP).

Rob,

Unfortunatelly the editor who "closed" the drives can't supply me with any more information. He says he "got an error message" and clicked off the drives. In reality the drives are healthy and back in operation. The problem is that we can't run all six drives AND the deck at the same time. Yes, this was possible before and it is a mystery to me why it is a problem now. It certainly makes digitizing a very touch and go experience.

I suspect many of these issues are human initiated - an assitant editor who panics when a drive is lost; and editor who reboots before all is closed down. Although I've initiated a no hot swapping rule - I wouldn't be surprised if some of that still went on.

While I was watching an assistnat editor digitize the other day and odd thing happened - the drives stopped responding (no red lights) but the digitizing kept on going. No error message, nothing.

oz

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : In theory you should be able to hook up 127 devices. .... Otherwise you might want to try and narrow down when the
most problems start happening. Which specific drives on which controllers or how many drives on a controller etc.-->>>

I had some time today to look into the problem a little. At first I went into Administrative Tools>Computer Management and saw that instead of the 5 1394 external drives, only 3 were showing as physical drives. Two of them were showing up as partitions of the same drive. This was most confusing, especially since after a few reboots later, the five drives showed up as they should.

But - the bottom line is that I cannot run the 5 drives at the same time. I need to turn off at least one drive in order for XP Pro to detect any of the drives. (I will test the fifth drive tomorrow to assure that it is working.)

I tried daisy chaining the five drives as they were originally, but that no longer works. I reverted back to what the tech guy configured - two drives, daisy chained and plugged into one port of a three port 1394 card. This allows me to plug in 4 drives into two ports and 1 into the third port. With the exception that the fifth drive is not showing up, this configuration seems to work.

I hope I've mentioned something that might strike a familiar chord. I'm at a total loss for answers.

Oz

My guess would be that there is something wrong with one or
more drives. Probably with the firewire interface, especially when
daisy chaining. You might want to try swapping drives around in
one chain to see what happens. 5 drives gives you 32 possible
combinations to try.

It is really odd when drives start appearing as partitions on others.
That's VERY dangerous for your data. It sounds like one or more
drives cannot uniquely identify themselves anymore somehow.

This is very strange!

Very strange and frustrating. I posted a cry for help on the Avid-L mail serve. If I don't get some useful responses from there, I'm really in trouble, deep trouble.

Oz

Well, there have been no definitive replies from anyone, not even at Avid-L. But I did get some quality time with the system today (Saturday and no one around) and I was able to pinpoint a few issues.

It seems the 1394 connection is lost after a certain amount of time. This explains why the digitized material does not show up - because by the time the db is being created, the connection, or drive, is no longer online. Forcing an exit from Avid and then forcing a database restore reveals the digitized clips except for the last one (where, I presume, is where the 1394 connection parted from the system.) But why should this happen is beyond me. I've turned off all screen savers and power management; and it's not the drives since they do come back after a reboot.

That is as far as I was able to get today. I had hoped to do some editing since my editor experiences a freeze or crash everytime he attempts to render.

As with everything else in computing, I'm learning tons from all these problems.

Have you thought about switching to internal drives?

Have you thought about switching to FCP? I haven't had your problems since I sold my Media Composer.

Glenn,

Yes, I have given the possibility of switching to internal drives some serious thought. In fact, I'm looking to purchase a large IDE drive from Dell. The drawback to internal drives is a singular one - lack of portability between systems. As it is right now, not only can we port media from one PC based Avid to another, we can even port it to a Mac with a Mac based Avid.

Jeff,

I haven't given the idea of switching to FCP a second's worth of thinking. The expense would be prohibitive not only in hardware but in re-training our editors and assistant editors. If Apple were to bring out a PC based FCP (fat chance) 0 then maybe I would look into it.

By the way, we do work with FCP since soem of our outside editors use it, and they also report similar problems with 1394 drives. So I don't feel this is an Avid problem.

Dell probably isn't the best place to purchase an IDE drive from.

newegg.com would be the place to go for the least hassle. If you're looking to really save, I'd check the following sites:
pricewatch.com and pricegrabber.com (both let you find the lowest price)

Hot deals sites like fatwallet.com, gotapex.com, etc. Retail chains usually have loss leaders on hard drives, but they are typically limited quantities and are designed to lure you into their store so you make impulse purchases.

2- Portability: You could get removable drive bays for internal ATA drives. I haven't tried this myself for video but it should work just as well as firewire. A downside to these is that they may be annoyingly loud because of the fans.

There are other solutions that might be worth looking into.

Gigabit ethernet. This should do at least 10MB/s in real world transfer speeds. (Just a wild ass scientific guess). It should easily handle 2 DV streams.

Replace all your firewire drives with big ones. Normal ones go up to 250GB but Lacie sells 500GB and 1000GB drives.

I've been looking at 1394b as a possible solution to my problem... or not. I was looking at the Medea G-RAID 320GB Titanium Color FireWire800 that ProMax sells as a more robust way to have my cake (keep the 1394 standard) and eat it (solve the write ahead and missing drives problems). What does ayone think?

A solution if you need to access data across multiple machines
is to have one server having all the storage and data and letting
the machines access this data over the network. You can all
set it up so that it looks like the storage is attached to the local
machine without any problems. You can also do centralized
backup and mirroring for example in such scenarios.

This can be a simple as a server with a stack of harddisks or an
external cabinet with drives. Or it can be more advanced with
full blown SAN's or NAS networks.

Rob, I understand what you are describing since I've worked in many editing suites that have Avids connected to terabytes of storage. What I don't understand is how to implement this system - which does appeal to me - with the hardware I already have (basically 1394 drives) and/or with a minimum expenditure of money.

My interest in 1394b is the notion (perhaps erroneous) that its increased speed alone might solve some of the problems I'm currently encountering. By the way, a new wrinkle - one of the systems "crashes" everytime it tries to render an effect. Someone suggested part of the problem might - might - be due to the fact that the drives were ported over from a different system.

I think it's time to start from scratch. The problem is that no one - not even ProMax or Avid - has been able to give me a difinitive diagnosis.

Thanks as always.

Too bad I'm so far away otherwise I would've loved to take a look
at this. I'm not an Avid guru by a long stretch but I do believe
you can go about this centralized storage in two tways. The
Avid way or the Windows way. The latter will be the cheapest
one to do and doesn't have to cost that much. It will cost money
because you will most likely want and need to upgrade to gigabit
network for example, but that doesn't have to be that expensive.

If you ever have a job opening as a media system administrator
let me know and I'll move to NY <g>

>>If you ever have a job opening as a media system administrator
let me know and I'll move to NY <g><<

No, but we are looking for an Avid DV PRO/1394/PC/networking/electronics - guru. Believe me, that combination is a hard one to find. We can find one - a computer guru - but not the other - an electronic head - or even if we have both - we still need an Avid expert.

I did went to electronics "school" but didn't finish it. Can't say I'm
an Avid guru either.....

Good luck with the hunt!

Okay, at the risk of going almost OT, here is a question that is actually related ---

Our editor has noticed certain discrepancies between the drive letters assigned by Windows XP Pro (as since through Administrative Tools) and the same drives as seem from Avid.

For example - Windows will see, say, drive G as active but empty; Avid, on the other hand, will see G as containing media (which it does) but it is grayed out and hence not accessible.

I think this is getting the problem back on track. Originally all the original 5 ProMax 1394 drives were simply ported over physically and plugged into a similar system. No effort was ever made to change the letters since at first there were no problems.

I'm not very familiar with how WXP or Avid DV Pro assign drive letters, but could this be in any way related to the fact that drives (and their letters) tend to vanished from Avid? Since this vanishing occurs mostly when the drive is not being accessed, the problems pop up much later and baffle everyone as to what might have caused the freeze or crash.

Not sure where this is leading us but I have a feeling we are on the right track.

By the way, I've placed an order for a Medea G-RAID 2/500GB Titanium Color FireWire800 drive AND a 3Port FireWire/1394b 64-bit/33MHz PCI Card all from ProMax. My thinking here is that we are better off with just one large drive all or nothing. I don't think the increased throughput will have much effect but at least the plugs are more robust.

What do you (anyone) think?

I supposed you cannot change drive letters in Avid, but then again
I barely know anything about that NLE. To change drive letters
in WXP is easy. Go to your control panel and from their to your
administrative tools. Open computer management from there
and select disk management under storage.

Now you can either reight-click on a partition below or an entry
above and choose "change drive letter and paths" and the next
dialog will allow you to pick a different drive letter.

It could also be that some information on the harddisk is corrupt
so that WXP is not seeing any data. That would be a more serious
issue.

Something is definitely very wrong here. If possible you might
want to clear out each drive, repartition them and then do a
reformat to see if that helps anything along. There are good
tools available as well to fix a drive or do data recovery, but those
aren't included with Windows.

Lesser drives reduce the chance of problems indeed (obviously).
Personally I would hook that data storage device up to the
network or something (as talked about earlier).

Thank you Rob. Trying to fix this problem is like trying to fix a jet engine in mid-flight. I can do everything necessary if only we were not at 35 thousand feet. I can fix this if our drives needn’t to be up and working; we can't empty the drives until we have consolidated the material into a free and healthy drive – a catch 22 of sorts.

My latest wrinkle, which is actually a telling one, is Avid stopping and closing in mid-boot. I noticed it always closed when it got to “reading media stream” – I turned off the 1394 drives and all is fine. We were able to digitize to the C drive. Of course we still need to access the 1394 drives, but one thing at a time.

The problem is not that the card or the drives are bad, or even that the cable(s) is bad – because everything works at one time or another. The apparent intermittent nature of the problem is what is most frustrating. Stay tuned

If you switch over to the new setup you should be able to do
what you want with the "older" drives? Right? We'll just have to
wait till that happens I guess.