my supported DVD/RW not seen in Environment Tab; no optical device in Stoarge Tab

[tdushane]

I have searched this forum, in vain, for an hour to find an answer to my question, which must be very common, and I have failed.

 

I have a Plextor 716-UF DVD/RW drive which is officially "qualified" in the Windows environment (XP SP2 for me) according to the EMC listing of supported drives.

 

However, in spite of multiple reboots, Retrospect 7.5 does not see it. Needless to say, the drive works with Windows, Nero burning CD, etc. Specifically, I mean that when going to the Storage Device dialog box, the Status Tab says "No tape or optical storage devices found." In the Environment tab, my two hard drives are listed, and in grey I have:

ID Vendor

1:0:0 (ignored)

CD:0 (ignored)

 

the two last lines are greyed out. The first drive is an internal IDE CD/RW drive, btw.

When I right click on either one of them and select "Don't Ignore ID", these two lines each goes from greyed out to boldface.

However, if I try to refresh this list (i.e., do another device scan), the devices revert to grey, and they are still not there.

 

Is there a way to force Retrospect to see these drives? Or put another way, is there a flag somewhere that may be set so that Retrospect can't see either drive? Obviously, I want to use the DVD/RW Plextor - I'm asking the generic question to understand the mechanism here.

 

I have checked, using sysinternals' process explorer, as well as the Windows task manager, and I cannot see any other process that is holding on to the drives.

 

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance,

 

Ted Dushane

[tdushane]

Still trying to get help on my "supported" drive which doesn't show up as a device to manage.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

teddushane@yahoo.com

[tdushane]

Well, it turns out that Retrospect is fine, but FAR from intuitive. I thought, naively, that if I right clicked on the grey items in my devices window (environment tab), and checked either "Ignore ID" or "Don't Ignore ID" that I could then refresh the window and it would toggle from available device in Retrospect (and unavailable to other apps) to unavailable to Retrospect (so, "ignored").

 

It turns out that what works is to quit and restart Retrospect after toggling the Ignore/Don't Ignore status.

 

This is logical enough, but I couldn't find it documented when I tried to search for this info in the manual.

 

It's a small thing, but if someone is using his/her DVD drive for other applications, this is an important feature to be able to control.

 

I'm glad it works so well, once I figured out how to do it.

[cbarnabo]

TDUSHANE, thank you SO much for posting your discovery here ... I had ignored a device deliberately to burn a CD while Retrospect was running and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to un-ignore it properly so I could run a backup. I was doing the same thing you had done - change from ignore to don't ignore, refresh, panic, repeat.

 

Just goes to show that when you do figure something out you can help a lot of folks by posting your discovery back to the forums!