Has anyone experienced corrupted harddrives when using the 1394HOST Mode to transfer footage from the p2 to firewire/usb drive?

It seems to happen when the verification fails after multiple transfers.. All the fat32 partitions are subbsequehtly lost on the drive (which is a major bummer if you are transferring from the p2 card and then formatting it again!)

Please help :(
Damo

Welcome to the forum, Damian.

We've been using the HOST mode on the camera for almost 10 months now with never a glitch. We always connect with a FW drive, not USB.

My suggestion is that you might have a bad controller on the external drive or, there might be physical problems with the drive platter itself if this problem persists. Try another external drive, preferrably the FW type since the data transfer is more stable than USB. If the problem persists with a different physical drive then it's a different issue.

Thanks Robert,
I appreciate your advice.
Just to confirm, do you use the verification mode and do you do multiple transfers onto the one drive (ie. where it creates more than one partition) ?
Also, what brand/model firewire drive are you using?
Thanks heaps!

Yes, we always do multiple xfrs; most of the time we leave verification off to speed up the x-fr but if we have footage that can't be easily re-shot then we turn it on.

You always get multiple partitions: one P2 card per partition.

I've been using OWC's Mercury Elite Pro FW800 250gb drives exclusively for our x-frs. I take an inverter with us on location to power the external drives from the car when it's time to x-fr.

How are you transferring your data ? We've been using. .

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=AA30310

and CompuAppps SwissKnife V3 Partition Utility to format the drive for the first time. . .no problems here. .

Cool. Thanks for all the info guys :)

Is there an procedural order for how you connect/diconnect and power the drive to the camera? (ie. Do you turn the drive on and then the cam, and when finished do you turn the cam off and then the drive?)

Do you think this might cause issues?

That depends on what drive and operating system you are using. If you let us know what hardware you are using, we'll be able to tell you better answers.

Here is a previous post by Barry and the USB-OnTheGo solution

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=55662&highlight=mwave

Sorry Vince, perhaps i should have been more clear.
I meant going from the camera directly to any generic external fw/usb caddy (not to a computer).

Damian,

The HVX manual talks about the proper procedure.

For direct connection to the drive in HOST mode, turn on the DRIVE FIRST and allow it to spin up a few seconds so it's ready to communicate. The camera is turned on second.

Do this in reverse when you're finished copying; turn the CAMERA OFF first, then the drive.

My suggestion is that when your drive reaches it's maximum partitions (15) make sure you copy off all your data to your edit system and let the CAMERA re-format the drive, not an external program from either a PC or Mac. This way you're assured that the format is exactly what the camera wants.

Thanks for all your wise advice guys.

I actually run a loans dept at a univeristy. We currently have 6 of these cameras, and over the past 3 months i've had about 5 corruptions reported by students when transferring using the 1394HOST (all the partitions are lost on the fw drive).

They usually tell me "Verification Error" pops up and then the drive looses its correct formatting from there on.

Im actually trying to replicate the issue myself, without any luck!

Has anyone else seen this?

Thanks
Damo

One word !
Students

Ha! As tempting as it would be to blame students ive finally had it happen to myself!

On the third time (this happens consistently) i transfer to the ext fw drive (1394 host mode) the camera comes up with 'verification failed'. If you turn the drive off and on it then becomes unreadable/corrupted.

Im thinking perhaps the drives are getting old, or they are too slow.... Still, this 'verification failed' is a pretty dangerous error and im not sure why it would corrupt the entire contents of the drive. Perhaps Panasonic should look into it.

Has anyone seen the error before, and if so, has it corrupted their drive too?

Sounds more like your hardware/drive setup thank the camera. My MWave setup has never failed me (so far).

Whats your hardware setup ? How fast are the drives ? Maybe the cables are at issue. . .

Well, the whole concept of it failing verification would point to it being a faulty drive.

The camera writes the contents out to the drive, then (optionally) reads them all back in and compares them against the card in the camera (the "verification process"). If there is any difference, you'll get a verification error.

How can you copy something to a drive, and then read it back from the drive, and have it be different? About the only way is: a faulty drive. You've got a bad piece of hardware there, I'd bet.