Hotswap Drivers

[sweetness]

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]

[sweetness]

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:

posted March 12, 2001 04:25 AM *** ** ** * * * ** **
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quote:
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Originally posted by swablar:
...IF you feel lucky go ahead keep using Apple utility on your audio drives. It will eventually bite you.
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swablar,

I would love to know what happened for you to say that Apple's Drive Setup "will eventually bite you." Please shed some light, because I've been using this for all of my internal and video IDE / ATA and ATTO connected audio SCSI drives for several months now. How will this eventually bite me?

[This message has been edited by Joe Privitelli (edited March 17, 2001).]

<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?

[Rail Jon Rogut]

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

[sweetness]

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...

[Polaris]

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

[Polaris]

Originally posted by sweetness:
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.

Yes

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.

That's correct, provided you also don't have "inhibit driver loading" enabled. With "IDL" enabled you'll need to turn the ATTO ext on if you want the drives to mount at startup

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?

We gave up on initializing with ATTO because it was totally unreliable on non-ATTO systems. But if you have FWB, there's a trick you can try, in FWB Toolkit, highlight the ATTO drive, hold CMD+OPT, click UNMOUNT twice, release keys and click mount. The FWB driver should now temporarily take over the drive. Not very elegant but it can get you by in a pinch. IMHO, I would stick to Apple or FWB drivers, people will argue otherwise I'm sure but it's worked well for our 10 systems for years. As always YMMV.

-Polaris

thanks!

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

[sweetness]

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!