Firewire Drives: "selective" invalid audio drives?...

[Mr T]

Here's the scenario: a few months ago I bought a Firewire drive (mainly for backup and transfer to TDM studios purposes). It's a LaCie with the proper chipset; I formated it as advised by Digi (erased the drive using the Mac's special menu and formated using Silverlining) and everything seemed OK (did many test with PT, no problem)... I was still using PT5.1.1 at that time.
A few months later, as I tried to open and play one of my recent session (before transfering it to a TDM system), I got the "Invalid audio drive" message...
Curious and confused, I ran some tests and came to discover that all sessions created using PT5.2.1(beta version) are impossible to play from the Firewire drive, while all older PT5.1.1 sessions still play fine !...?...
If I drag and drop one of those PT5.2.1 session to one of my IDE drives or after transfering to TDM (and playing the session from SCSI drives), everything works perfectly...
What's up with those Firewire drives??... Don't they like beta versions?...Has anyone else experienced something like that?...
That is the question...

[Mr T]

Off I go??...

[Tim Itis]

Had the same thing with a LaCie. Make sure to disable any LaCie extensions that might be there from when you installed Silverlining, only leaving Apple's Firewire Enabler and Firewire Support and you should be ok.

[Mr T]

Thanks for the answer, but I thought that was what I did when erasing the drive using the Mac's special menu... gotta check this...

[Slim Shady]

If you formatted using silverlining, you used a third party driver. USE ONLY THE MAC OS FORMATTING UTILITIES, and make sure all the silverlining stuff is disabled after you reformat.

[Chris Coleman]

Originally posted by Mr T:
erased the drive using the Mac's special menu and formated using Silverlining

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">It is best NOT to use 3rd party formatting programs...
When you erase FW drives using Mac's "erase disk" command from the Special menu, you ARE formatting it - there's no need to go back and have a 3rd party formatting program.
Pro Tools seems to like to see FW drives controlled by Mac's FW drivers, not anyone else's.

[Tim Itis]

You need to go into the extensions manager and actually disable the LaCie drivers. Even if you format with "erase disk", it will use the LaCie drivers if they're active.

[Mr T]

OK guys thanks for the infos... What I still don't get is how to partition without using a third party software such as Silverlining?... The Special Menu erases the drive...but that's pretty much it...?...

[Chris Coleman]

re: partitioning firewire drives.

Well - you can use third party software, but you'll most likely get more error messages than you really want to deal with from Pro Tools.

If you don't mind voiding the FW drive's warranty and going through the hassle, just pop the box open, take the actual ATA drive out and plop it into your computer and reformat/partition that way... then take it out and pop it back into the FW case.

[Tim Itis]

Partition with Silverling, then use Erase Disk to format each partition. Again, make sure you only have the apple FW drivers active.