Firewire destination volume unmounts spontaneously

[marutgers]

I have spent about a full day trying to have retrospect back up

the three HDs in my main computer to an external firewire HD

(http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/external/external200.html)

In the backup session, the first HD works properly. Then, about

10 seconds into the second HD to be backed up, an error -102

appears. The firewire drive has disappeared. Retrospect cannot

see it, nor can windows. I can find the remnants of it in the

windows device manager, but it claims to be damaged. Upon reboot,

everything is back to normal. I have used this drive for days on

end without any trouble, before installing retrospect. Something about retrospect

seems to precipitate the problem.

 

Also note that when I go to the configure/volumes option in

retrospect, I see that my firewire disk with 99.99% free space is

recognized within retrospect (via right click/properties) as

having only 12% free space. (See

http://maartenrutgers.org/retrospect.gif for a screenshot).

 

I have already tried different firewire cables, turning off the

write buffer, writing to a backup file vs disk, but the problem

always comes back.

 

What can I do here????

 

I am running retrospect backup pro, ver 6.5.343 on a windows 2000

computer, with all the latest windows updates. I use an adaptec

4300 firewire card. Both card and had drive have latest firmware, to my knowledge.

 

Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

 

Maarten Rutgers.

[natew]

Hi

 

I think you are on the right track troubleshooting cables,cache and firewire drivers. This sounds like a general I/O problem of some kind. Have you checked that you have the newest BIOS for your motherboard?

 

Are there other firewire devices attached at the time of backup? You may want to disconnect them and try again.

 

Thanks

Nate

[marutgers]

Ok, problem resolved, nothing to do with Dantz.

 

Solution: Buy a USB2.0 controller card for my pc and use that instead of the firewire card.

 

I poked around the web and found that there are scattered reports on users with spontaneously disappearing firewire devices. XP SP2 may fix the problem, but microsoft appears to have no plans for a fix for win2k. Sometimes unplugging and reconnecting is enough. In my case, a reboot was necessary. At first, the drive would stay active for a few hours, but after a while MTBF was down to less than 10 minutes. The problem persisted with the windows built in backup utility (hence it was not Dantz).

 

I tried a loptop with XP and built in firewire, no problems.

Today I bought an adaptec 2.0 USB controller and everything is as it should be.

 

Bottom line: If you are buying a seagate external drive (or probably any other drive with an oxford 911 bridge chipset) and use it on a win2k machine which does not yet have firewire support, consider buing a USB 2.0 controller instead. Chances are firewire will work fine with you. The problem does not appear widespread. I probably just got lucky with my combination of hardware and OS.

 

Maarten.