HELP!!! 1394 drives and deck have vanished from PC DV Pro!!!

[Ozzie Alfonso]

Rob, I understand what you are describing since I've worked in many editing suites that have Avids connected to terabytes of storage. What I don't understand is how to implement this system - which does appeal to me - with the hardware I already have (basically 1394 drives) and/or with a minimum expenditure of money.

My interest in 1394b is the notion (perhaps erroneous) that its increased speed alone might solve some of the problems I'm currently encountering. By the way, a new wrinkle - one of the systems "crashes" everytime it tries to render an effect. Someone suggested part of the problem might - might - be due to the fact that the drives were ported over from a different system.

I think it's time to start from scratch. The problem is that no one - not even ProMax or Avid - has been able to give me a difinitive diagnosis.

Thanks as always.

[Rob Lohman]

Too bad I'm so far away otherwise I would've loved to take a look
at this. I'm not an Avid guru by a long stretch but I do believe
you can go about this centralized storage in two tways. The
Avid way or the Windows way. The latter will be the cheapest
one to do and doesn't have to cost that much. It will cost money
because you will most likely want and need to upgrade to gigabit
network for example, but that doesn't have to be that expensive.

If you ever have a job opening as a media system administrator
let me know and I'll move to NY <g>

[Ozzie Alfonso]

>>If you ever have a job opening as a media system administrator
let me know and I'll move to NY <g><<

No, but we are looking for an Avid DV PRO/1394/PC/networking/electronics - guru. Believe me, that combination is a hard one to find. We can find one - a computer guru - but not the other - an electronic head - or even if we have both - we still need an Avid expert.

[Rob Lohman]

I did went to electronics "school" but didn't finish it. Can't say I'm
an Avid guru either.....

Good luck with the hunt!

[Ozzie Alfonso]

Okay, at the risk of going almost OT, here is a question that is actually related ---

Our editor has noticed certain discrepancies between the drive letters assigned by Windows XP Pro (as since through Administrative Tools) and the same drives as seem from Avid.

For example - Windows will see, say, drive G as active but empty; Avid, on the other hand, will see G as containing media (which it does) but it is grayed out and hence not accessible.

I think this is getting the problem back on track. Originally all the original 5 ProMax 1394 drives were simply ported over physically and plugged into a similar system. No effort was ever made to change the letters since at first there were no problems.

I'm not very familiar with how WXP or Avid DV Pro assign drive letters, but could this be in any way related to the fact that drives (and their letters) tend to vanished from Avid? Since this vanishing occurs mostly when the drive is not being accessed, the problems pop up much later and baffle everyone as to what might have caused the freeze or crash.

Not sure where this is leading us but I have a feeling we are on the right track.

By the way, I've placed an order for a Medea G-RAID 2/500GB Titanium Color FireWire800 drive AND a 3Port FireWire/1394b 64-bit/33MHz PCI Card all from ProMax. My thinking here is that we are better off with just one large drive all or nothing. I don't think the increased throughput will have much effect but at least the plugs are more robust.

What do you (anyone) think?

[Rob Lohman]

I supposed you cannot change drive letters in Avid, but then again
I barely know anything about that NLE. To change drive letters
in WXP is easy. Go to your control panel and from their to your
administrative tools. Open computer management from there
and select disk management under storage.

Now you can either reight-click on a partition below or an entry
above and choose "change drive letter and paths" and the next
dialog will allow you to pick a different drive letter.

It could also be that some information on the harddisk is corrupt
so that WXP is not seeing any data. That would be a more serious
issue.

Something is definitely very wrong here. If possible you might
want to clear out each drive, repartition them and then do a
reformat to see if that helps anything along. There are good
tools available as well to fix a drive or do data recovery, but those
aren't included with Windows.

Lesser drives reduce the chance of problems indeed (obviously).
Personally I would hook that data storage device up to the
network or something (as talked about earlier).

[Ozzie Alfonso]

Thank you Rob. Trying to fix this problem is like trying to fix a jet engine in mid-flight. I can do everything necessary if only we were not at 35 thousand feet. I can fix this if our drives needn’t to be up and working; we can't empty the drives until we have consolidated the material into a free and healthy drive – a catch 22 of sorts.

My latest wrinkle, which is actually a telling one, is Avid stopping and closing in mid-boot. I noticed it always closed when it got to “reading media stream” – I turned off the 1394 drives and all is fine. We were able to digitize to the C drive. Of course we still need to access the 1394 drives, but one thing at a time.

The problem is not that the card or the drives are bad, or even that the cable(s) is bad – because everything works at one time or another. The apparent intermittent nature of the problem is what is most frustrating. Stay tuned

[Rob Lohman]

If you switch over to the new setup you should be able to do
what you want with the "older" drives? Right? We'll just have to
wait till that happens I guess.