Hi all,

I bought an extra seagate 300GB (7200rpm) Hard Disk Drive to store more DV-footage than I can now (80 GB). I'm having some issues however properly making this one work.

The HDD won't play any video-files. When I copy a DV (or other video) file to the new disk and try to run it (windows media player, VLC, ...); it doesn't work. I find it particularry annoying I can't load in video-footage from this new disk into any of my two NLE solutions. Vegas crashes when loading the footage from explorer to project media (it crashes when trying to play a fresh clip on the timeline). And Avid Xpress Pro does the same when I load footage in the "OMFI media files" folder I located on the new drive. Whenever I make a new media-file (title e.g.) and save it to the new disk, avid crashes all the same.

The funny thing is: the drive seems to work properly for other media files (pictures, audio, music, text files). So my local shopkeeper laughs at me when I explain the exact problem. It works, yet not for the purposes I bought it for.
I currently installed the drive as the "slave" drive and all pins/connectors are correct. My OS is installed on the other, master drive.

What could be causing the problem?
What can I do about this?
Will formatting everything, installing the big drive as "master" and installing the OS (winXP) on this drive along with all needed NLE applications solve anything?

Greetz,

Merlin

I'm told that installing the drives on the same bus (ie one as master and one as slave) can cause problems. I was told that the drives should be installed on different buses. (HDD 1 vs HDD 2?) Anyway, that's how I've always done mine and I've never had the problems you describe.

Good luck!

Mark

Is it formatted as FAT32? Have you tried to copy/capture files larger than the maximum permitted with FAT32 (4GB). Possibly, you have corrupt files.

(When I buy a new external drive, first thing I do is reformat it to NTFS.)

I agree, sounds like a file system issue. FAT32 won't due anthing above 2GB. While I've never bought a hard disk that was preformatted, it is easy to format in FAT32 by mistake, especially if your OS is FAT32. If so, simple run the convert option in Windows to make all your drives NTFS.

You may also want to try

chkdsk /f /r in the command line, reboot and see if you have a corrupt fat table...

I had about the same trouble as you some time ago.
(about 1,5 years ago?)

In my case, it was some drivers for the bios/motherboard that needed to be upgraded.