Need Firewire 800 drivers

Hello,

I just bought a Startech Firewire 800 PCI card and installed it. But apparently it has no drivers, because the "new hardware found" wizard comes up and there's a yellow flag in device manager when I connect the LaCie external drive via a Firewire 800 cable.

I called Startech, and he said the card did not come with drivers because Windows already has them. I'm running XP home, SP3, and I don't think that guy was right that Windows already has the drivers.

I hung up when he told me to reinstall Windows, and now I'm asking you all for help.

Thanks.

 

Follow Pete's advice first.

In addition you may want to read Performance of 1394 devices may decrease after you install Windows XP Service Pack 2 . Article includes Windows XP (KB885222) download. This pertains to 1394b ports (Firewire 800) and speed issues.

In addition you may want to read FireWire 800 under Windows XP SP2 . Just travel slowly through this article. Many suggestions, quirks and curves. This article is written by a manufacturer, (not Startech), but brings insight into compatibility issues.

 

Pete, the yellow flag was for the external disk drive I was trying to connect to the Firewire 800 card.

The 1394 host controller was indicated as okay.

But I may have solved the problem: I downloaded 1394B drivers from Startech (so much for the Startech support guy who said they had no drivers and that windows didn't need them) -- these are actually TI drivers called ubcore32 -- and installed them. It made me nervous, because a warnming came up during install that these drivers were not Microsoft tested, but the disk seems to be recognized now.

Should I have already had 1394b drivers in Windows? Could I have just updated the old 1394 driver in "device manager" and it would have found these 1394 drivers (or similar ones) on its own?

Just wondering for future reference.

And Dennis, I'm using SP3 -- do you think those performance issues affect SP3 as well as SP2. If so, I'll read the documents, thanks.

 

Best test - Does external drive work and have acceptable speed.
With any new technology, their will be compatibility issues... Firewire 800 is just beginning acceptance from the masses.
The forum would be most interested in your endeavor down this road. I just installed eSata/USB2 eternal this weekend (Icy Dock MB559 enclosure and SAMSUNG 750GB/32MB) and it flies as fast as my internal (Segate 750GB/32MB) under eSata port, very pleased. As a test, I created/stored a Acronis image (5GB output) directly to the eSata drive ... create and write done in 92 seconds.

 

I ran the PC Backup software and it processed 5.6GB in 25 minutes before it aborted. Maybe it was the software, maybe the Firewire interface. One reason I think it may have been the Firewire is the fact that the drive itself suddenly couldn't be accessed using explorer.

Anyway, I'm trying it again using the USB connection. If it aborts again, I can figure it's probably the backup software and I'll try True Image then.

As for speed, 5.6GB in 25 minutes doesn't seem all that fast to me -- maybe a little faster than USB but not by much I don't think. Would it run faster if I didn't use software compression? I don't really need to save space on the external drive.

If it turns out that it's the firewire drivers responsible for the first aborted backup, should I uninstall the drivers I got via Startech and install the ones you linked to, Pete?

 

For now let's not get to excited about our speeds.
After you installed the drivers, did you reboot computer?
If not, I would suggest safe release your external drive and power it down. Cold boot the computer, powerup external.
Load XP Disk Management, is external recognized?
Does it have a "Healthy" status?
Did you format drive? NTSF or FAT32?
If your backup software was creating a "single zip" from many smaller files, FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4GB minus 2 Bytes ... could have caused the abort.

TESTING
Find a large data file on your internal drive and copy it over to your external. Have no programs loaded / running.

 

Well, I just did a 32.3GB backup in one hour and 15 minutes via USB. I can live with that.

As for the source of the previous aborted backup and temporary non-recognition of the external disk, I did reboot the machine after installing the drivers. Rebooting again after the drive was not showing up enabled it to be recognized again via firewire 800.

So I'm not sure what the problem is, but I've noticed the PC is also very sluggish since these firewire drivers were installed. Could they cause that problem?

In any event, it sounds like either these particular drivers are a problem, or that I won't get 1394b speeds no matter what I do. If that's the case, I'll return the PCI card and uninstall the drivers.

On that score, is it better to uninstall the drivers via "add or remove programs" or just go to device manager and uninstall them there?

Or does it make no difference?

Thanks for your help.

 

Now I'm really in trouble, Pete.

I uninstalled the drivers through add/remove programs, but the machine remained sluggish. I mean, just clicking on IE or Outlook or anything just leaves the hourglass hyanging for 10-15 seconds before it slowly begins to activate the program. Internet speeds are molasses slow.

And worst of all, suddenly all my restore points are gone!! Except for the restore point created when ubcore configured the drivers. Which, when I restore back to that one point, leaves me unable to uninstall those drivers except through device manager (the add/remove programs function lists ubcore but won't let me uninstall it).

So I can't get back to before I installed the card and drivers.

I do have a backup now, but it's the backup that includes the drivers.

Is there a way to recover those restore points? If not, how do I clean up this system, get system restore working again to create daily restore points, and improce the speed and functyionality of my system?

How ironic that I ******* up the system simply by trying to create a backup and secure it!

I'm really nervous about this. This is my work and a big chunk of my life.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

 

Thanks, Pete. I'm going out of town for two days -- great timing -- so I'll check back with you later.

 

Okay, I'm back, Pete.

I deleted all temp files (3500 or so) except for ~DF2419.tmp for which access is denied me and ICEAE.tpm which is read only.

I wasn'ty sure if I should delete all c:\windows\temp files (including cookies, which I'd l;ike to avoid doing if possible) or just the windows\temp
temporary internet files. So please advise.

Now what's interesting about task manager is that it shows some processes running that are eating up memory that I don't think should be running. For example, I've got winword.exe using 10,996K even though the program is not running, as well as CCAPP.exe (16,088K) which I'm not sure what that is, CCSETMGR.exe 10,584K), SVChost.exe (19780K), and then Outlook.exe (24676K) which is running and iexplore.exe (37308 K) which is also running.

Plus a number of other processes running anywhere from 5,000K to 1,000K.

So I'm not sure what to make of it. When I right click on winword.exe to shut down the process, I get a warning saying deata may be lost or the system rendered unstable, so I didn't do it.

Can you make anything of the above. Should I delete all \windows\temp folders and files, even cookies?

Anyway, just to reiterate: It takes 30-45 seconds for Outlook or IE to launch. After Outlook is launched, the first time I click on other than a current email, it hangs with the hourglass for about 45 seconds until it moves that that new email, then everything seems to work okay, albeit more slowly. So *sluggish* does seem the word here.

Thanks for trying to help me through this, Pete. I can always reinstall or repair windows, but I agree let's save those for last.

 

Pete,

My windows\temp diorectory does include a number of folders, including windows\cookies and windows\NAV and windows\history and windows\temporary internet files.

On my 80 GB drive, my C partition has 22 GB free space (out of 40 GB) and the only partition near to full is E where I have only 1.7GB out of 9.75 free. But the whole drive is only about half full.

As for CPU usage, task manager shows right now 4% CPU usage, 247MB PF usage, 253,360 commit charge (out of 2521844 limit and 636976 peak), 1047344K total physical memory with 692356 available.

Also, I noticed that Quicken no longer opens. I need that program badly. Could something I deleted yesterday amonmg those 3500 temp files be preventing Quicken from opening? I could always restore those files.

If I do a full restore, should I do it onto a new drive (I bought a new 80 GB drive just in case) or should I do it onto this same drive?

I'd still like to avoid that -- or having to reinstall after a fresh wipe, as I don't have all the original software (like Quicken) and I'll have to go contact a bunch of vendors. Oh Lord, what a drag.

 

I've been wracking my brains trying to remember exactly when my machine went bad. And it's possible that it was still working fine AFTER I did my full backup using PC Backup. What happened next is tyhat I decided to also do a backup using a trial version of Acronis True Image 11 and left it to run while I went home for the evening. When I got back in the next morning, I saw that the Acronis backup was aborted with some sort of error message like "can't read disk bad sectors." I cancelled out, and it was at that point that I realized for sure the machine wasn't working right.

Ergo, it's POSSIBLE that my first backup, using PC Backup, was of a machine that was still working. Possible, but not certain.

Which means that maybe -- just maybe -- that backup is of a good machine, albeit one with those firewire 800 drivers.

Should I try a full restore and see?

 

One last question: Before I do anything drastic like restore or wipe and reinstall, does it make sense to call someone like the Geek Squad to see if they can figure it out? If they're just good for basic computer stuff -- e.g., configuring IE or something -- then it doesn't make sense. But if they have diagnostic tools and might be able to see what's going on in my system in a way that I can't, would it make sense?

I don't mind spending the money, but I do mind wasting time or having someone ***** it up worse than it already is.