firewire connection

[guanche]

Hellooo!!

I have a firewire/usb external hard-disk. It works perfectly when using the usb conection but when i connect it via firewire the connection is lost after 4 or 5 minutes using (it suddenly get disconected).

It is the first time i plug something via firewire and i dont know if i have to configure something or what.

Do you know something?????

[af-TimOBrien]

Could be:

A) a bad cable. (always the cheapest thing to check first)

B) dodgy firewire card. Did you buy a cheap one??? Have you tried to connnect anything else??

C) Loose drive cable in the external box. Open it up and disconnect/reconnect them several times.

D) bad drive or drive controller in the external box. What brand is it?

Learning how to troubleshoot electronics isn't difficult, you just have to go step by step and rule out each component....

[guanche]

Well, maybe you a re right, but it seems to me more like some kind of configuration issue because it is always the same pattern: i plugg and it works for 4 or 5 minutes. After that it get disconnected (virtually disconnected, i mean)
Anyway i don´t have any other firewire stuff to compare with. I will have to find something out.

[guanche]

Something new has happend!!

Other times i plugged the hard disk when the PC was already running.
This morning i tryied switching on the HD and then the PC and i had no problem.

Why is that?
May it ensure that the problem is related to some kind of configuration?

[af-TimOBrien]

No. There is nothing to "configure" in Firewire.

My points above are still valid.

[oretez]

actually there are 'configurations' . .. they may not be user accessable

but manfc have quite a bit of leeway as to how they implement 1394 instruction set (all the 'must have TI chipset' is not pure hoopla) . . . then there was MS XP2 embarassment (required a patch to repair firewire implementation)

so 'dodgy' card, bad cable or not bad ideas to investigate . . . it is possible that chip set in HD has issues with specific system 'configuration'

one of my earliest firewire HD enclosures could only be identified on the local network (or any network it's local CPU was attached to) if it was first present when OS booted . . . drive pretty much ran 24/7 for more then four years then moved into rotation as a project B/U disk where it still works fine . . . different HD's on same card and same cable never produced same symptoms

there is simply no way to anything but purely speculative about this particular issue

but strategy of having drive present when OS boots is certainly something to investigate as an inelegant and somewhat dodgy workaround (but yeah check cable, disk & card as well)

[guanche]

The cable is new.

But the disk and the card, how do i check them?????