HDX Cards no longer showing in Pro Tools, Digitest or CoreAudio

[youngas75]

On Thursday, our trashcan Mac Pro with the Sonnet chassis stopped showing the HDX card. Pro Tools shows only aggregate, built-in or HDMI for playback engine. The HD I/O is powered up and the ring goes to green but cannot be accessed. Nothing has been changed in either hardware (all mounted in a closed rack) or software (settings cannot be changed by users due to Deep Freeze) but it's just gone. Tried running DigiTest and the cards don't show up. Updated Mac OS (still using El Capitan 10.11.6) and updated the HD driver to 12.8.3 but still no joy.

Has anyone had any experience of this or would anyone know why the cards would just stop working one day?

They're very new, just over 1 year old along with the rest of the studio so it's quite confusing!

[Drew Mazurek]

Do you have anything else you can put into the chassis to test? Sounds like it's dead. Or another computer to test for bad TB buss?

What does system profiler show?

[jsvalmont]

I have an HDX|2 system in a Magma EB3T chassis with a current PT|HD subscription. 2 of the slots are taken up by HDX cards and the last slot has a PCIE SSD. Within the last week I purchased an iMac Pro. My previous primary machine was my MacBook Pro. I used Migration Assistant to attempt to move all my data over to the iMac Pro. When that was complete, I hooked up my Magma to the iMac Pro. The SSD showed up on the iMac but the HDX cards were nowhere to be found just like you are describing. I then tried plugging the Magma back into the MacBook Pro and the HDX cards were working fine. So I uninstalled Pro Tools, trashed everything Pro Tools related, including the HD driver and reinstalled PT & Driver. Still nothing. I considered calling Avid support, but since it was a brand new machine I decided to just re-format the hard drive and reinstall programs manually. That ended up working. I know that is probably not an option for you but I just wanted you to know that just because its not showing up doesn't mean there is necessarily a hardware failure. Consider calling Avid support in your situation.

Another previous experience I had was with an issue with a Corning 10 meter thunderbolt cable that was having a finicky connection to the machine room. The longer TB cables from my experience tend to have more issues. So if you have a long thunderbolt cable connection to your computer that could also be it.

[youngas75]

OK so just had the studio in pieces for the last 3 hours! Cards out, back in one at a time, 1st card didn't work, second card did, put them both in, both fine! What the hell?!

Maybe they just wanted a little outing. Anyway, I guess it's now just going to be a case of running it and seeing if it happens again. What a nightmare.

Thanks for the help and suggestions.