I don't believe this was the fix, but so far...

[EwanG]

Yes, it's me again

If you've been following me on my travails, you know that in my last installment I had pretty much thrown up my hands and was trying to find a program that would let me copy files to my external, removable Firewire drives at a controlled slow rate as my Toshiba seemed to have issues no matter what Firewire PC Card I was using.

Well, I did find such a program (called Total Copy), and it did help if I was willing to throttle down to between 400 or 500kbps. On a 24 Gig directory that was a pretty LONG copy and knowing I was going to be doing that a lot, I had to put that aside as my "in emergency" backup.

I took the two drive bays and a couple of drives to my desktop machine and was able to copy files back and forth (and from the desktop to either drive) just fine. That let me get my files where I wanted them to start with, but again presented the problem of having to carry stuff up and downstairs on a frequent basis.

So I decided to start looking into what else I might be able to tweak on my Toshiba that might help. The Portege 3500 uses a Trident Cyberblade video chip, and I had already had to tweak MS Media player to use less video acceleration when playing back a file to keep the audio and video in sync. It occurred to me that maybe I should try the same thing for the whole system setting.

So, I turned down the video acceleration two clicks from the "full' setting. And also turned off write combining. So far (knock on wood) this seems to have "fixed" the problem. I will be doing a video capture this evening, and will be interested to see if fixing my data transfer problem messes up my video capturing.

In any event, I'd be curious as to thoughts on why turning down video acceleration appears to fix this problem? The Portege has a 1.3 GhZ PIIM and I happen to have 1 Gig of Ram on the machine. So I would have thought the machine could keep up with things.

Your thoughts and insights would be appreciated,
Ewan

[The village idiot]

Very odd. I would have thought your machine being new would have worked well with almost any firewire card at full speed. Even my crumby Portege 3010 will run at full speed on the cheapest pcmcia card I could find, that being a CompUSA brand that uses the Via chip.

I wonder if your problem could be some kind of XP tablet wierdness, or maybe some kind of power saving thing.

What chip does the enclosure use? Also have you tried to disable the USB2 port? That is the only hardware thing that has every messed up my firewire, on the one computer that has USB2. It also messed up a bunch of other stuff too. Even when there was nothing connected, it used too many system resources to allow the rest to function properly. It was a mess, so now I just do not load the USB2 driver and all is fine.

[EwanG]

Very odd. I would have thought your machine being new would have worked well with almost any firewire card at full speed.

That's rather what I thought going in too. However experience so far has been quite the opposite...

I wonder if your problem could be some kind of XP tablet wierdness, or maybe some kind of power saving thing.

Always am plugged in when using the firewire drives, and have disabled every power management setting I could find for "plugged in". Tablet wierdness is always a possibility, but tweaking settings there seemed to have no effect. Which is why I didn't run to the Video settings at first. However, some additional reading makes me wonder if the Trident Cyberblade XP isn't a shared memory video device (i.e. it can take some of the system ram), and perhaps that has something to do with it...

What chip does the enclosure use?

Oxford with support for large (up to 320 Gigs) drives.

Also have you tried to disable the USB2 port? That is the only hardware thing that has every messed up my firewire, on the one computer that has USB2. It also messed up a bunch of other stuff too. Even when there was nothing connected, it used too many system resources to allow the rest to function properly. It was a mess, so now I just do not load the USB2 driver and all is fine.

No, I haven't tried that. Since I have only one device that requires USB, and I could replace it with a firewire backup, that sounds of some interest. How would one "turn off" USB2 in Windows XP?

[The village idiot]

Not sure in XP, but in 2000 controlpanel --->system --> device manager -->hardware then find the USB2 device and right click and chose disable. It might allow you to still use USB1 devices, from what little I've seen the USB2 is a seperate device.

[EwanG]

Well, playback of video files with the video acceleration turned down proved to be next to impossible. So I tried the next best thing, I set the system to 16-bit color, down from 24-bit while returning my video acceleration to full and reenabling write combining. I also turned off my USB bus and devices per one of the previous posters.

Doing both of those things allowed me to write and copy consistently to my firewire drives. Was even able to do a couple captures with my Canopus ADVC-100 to one of the firewire drives - which seems to be the acid test for working the firewire stream.

I may try the process again tonight with the USB turned on (but nothing connected) just to see if that really was necessary or not.

Of course, the lesson learned here is probably to pay more attention to the video subsystem of any new box I get in the future.

FWIW,
Ewan