I am having this problem where i try to hook up my mini-dv camera to my computer, and it is not recognized by avid or my computer unless i eject the hardrives that are connected to my computer as well via firewire. Any ideas? I know its not an avid issue, but i am just curious if anyone knows the solution to this because i dont have any more storage space and i need to be able to capture to those external drives. Thanks in advance.

Tom

Have you tried connecting the camera to the last FW harddrive connected to the computer?

Do you have onboard FW ports and a seperate FW card?

Andrew,

You mean directly into the firewire harddrive? I currently have it hooked into a seperate fw card, along with 2 other harddrives, which is where the problem occurs. The camera isnt recognized  if i hook it up into the onboard fw ports either.

Tom

weird - the computer should at least recognize it. you say "drives" and there may be a limit to how many devices can be recognized. but the best long-term solution is to get a 2nd firewire card. use 1 only for drives and the other only for your camera/deck. I used to get a lot of write-failure errors to the firewire drive and solved that problem completely with another 1394 card, which is also quite cheap. just stick it in an empty slot. check the motherboard specs - best is a slot with different path than the 1st one.           - sasha

sasha

thanks, yea i have an extra fw card lying around, as well as an esata card. im sure if i installed the 2nd fw card that would fix the problem. thanks for the response.

tom