Why is my FW drive set to T and won't go to R?

[albee1952]

Hey folks, trying to get a friend up and running with an older rig. The Vista laptop seems to run PT8(with original Mbox) just fine, so I gave him one of my Lacie FW400 drives. Its formatted as NTFS and BASIC. Windows can drag files to and from without issue. Pro Tools will only see it as a Transfer drive and will not allow me to change the T to an R in the workspace window. The rig will record to the system drive fine(which we all know is not supported). All he does is record and edit speakers for podcasting, but it sure would be nice if the Lacie drive would work. Could this all boil down to an incompatible FW controller, or is there something I need to do with the drive(besides toss it)?

[RTFM]

I'd reformat the drive using that computer - that *should* fix it.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by RTFM

I'd reformat the drive using that computer - that *should* fix it.

Exactly what I was thinking....but it didn't help

[RTFM]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Exactly what I was thinking....but it didn't help

HMMMMM. Odd indeed. It works fine on other machines, right? What FW controller chip is in that laptop?

Don't toss the drive - at the very least pull the hard drive from it and you can install it in a desktop or something.

Happen to have another FW drive to test with, to rule out if it's the drive or the computer?

[albee1952]

Its tough for me to get the nuts and bolts here as its not my machine(but it is my drive that worked fine on my own setup). So its possible the firewire controller is the issue. Since he needs this laptop for everything, maybe I will be better off assembling a dedicated machine from some parts I can scrape together. I was just hoping for a "DUH" solution as I have seen the issue described, but could not locate a solution So much for doing it for nothing