Hotswap Drivers
 

I've been digging through the old posts, but now I am more confused than when I started.

how can i swap drives between two different PT rigs and insure compatibility? room 'A' has a 9600/d24 running os9.x and 5.1.1 with an adaptec card and FWB drivers. room 'B' has a G4/450/mix+ with an ATTO card and drivers.

I am planning to just initialize all the drives with apple disk utility and use apple drivers for everything.

will this allow me to be compatible with both the ATTO and adaptec card?

will i have to turn off any ATTO extensions on the G4?

if I turn off the ATTO extensions will i still be able to launch ExpressPro-Tools and slow down the bus specs if i have apple drivers?

and if apple drivers aren't the answer, what is?

thanks! [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

Re: Hotswap Drivers
 

alright.

after reading more threads. i think i can "inhibit driver loading" which will allow the FWB drives to be mounted on the ATTO system using their drivers from their extension. but that wont let me take the ATTO drives to the FWB system?

and i just read: <font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">but theres no follow up.. my friend says use apple drivers for everything, but is that a bad idea?

Re: Hotswap Drivers
 

You'll find that if you move drives between the ATTO and Adaptec systems.. you get a -36 error when the drive has the driver for the wrong card.. simply updating the driver will usually fix the problem.

Rail

Re: Hotswap Drivers
 

so I just change the driver during every single move? the hotswaps need to move freely back and forth between the rooms. so if i bring the FWB drive into the ATTO room, and change the driver to ATTO, then i cant go back to the FWB room.

and I cant change an FWB driver to ATTO without initializing the drive, no? which would make it all moot.\\

thanks rail...

Re: Hotswap Drivers
 

Yeah that's the beauty of ATTO...simplicity [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

We are doing as you suggest every day; this is how its works for us.

-All Kingston Datasilo drives get initialized with FWB 4.5 (we used the Apple drivers for a while without problems but went with FWB again for some of their software's features).

-They mount on both ATTO and Adaptec systems without user intevention. (caveat: NO ATTO Extension at boot time and no "inhibit driver loading").

-NOW if you start to have PCI buss errors things can get tricky. As you say, you can't get the ATTO driver over to the ADAPTEC systems in this scenario but as I understand it, that won't be much help anyway as the ATTO driver is only useful on ATTO systems. And through tuning our systems (turning off ext's etc.) we have been able to use the FWB drivers successfully on both types systems.

-As you probably know, the "inhibit driver loading" is only temporary, and might be the ticket should you experience PCI errors.

YMMV. We were extremely relunctant to initialize with ATTO because of problems (drives get these confusing ghost partitions; they don't mount sometimes on Adaptec systems, etc.) As with all this stuff, everyone's got an opinion... [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

Good luck.

Cheers,
-Polaris

Re: Hotswap Drivers
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">

Re: Hotswap Drivers
 

thanks for the info polaris...

so, to summarize, you have the EPT extension disabled on the ATTO machines, and this lets the FWB drives run in harmony with the ATTO card.

and so you are saying, it doesnt really matter what your drive has on it if you dont load those ATTO expresspro tools extensions at boot.

ok,
but theres a problem when you take an ATTO driver into the adaptec room. will i get -36 when i run those drives? and is there no way around this?

thanks!