I recently purchased a new HP Compaq 5750 dual core 4000 with 4gb of Ram and Dual Monitor card. It is running Windows xp pro x64.
The main purpose of this machine is to take it onsite when I need to do acquisitions of drives. So I thought it would be best to test the machine before I ever needed it, this is where my problems arose.
I decided to try and acquire an 80gb SATA drive. I attached the drive to my Tableau SATA Write Blocker which was then attach via firewire to a pci firewire card. When I powered the Write Blocker on Windows started going through the motion of detecting the attached drive but would then act like it was searching for another monitor…then the monitor would go to sleep and I would have to turn the Write Blocker off and reboot the machine.
I then went in and disabled the second monitor port…hoping this might fix the problem. Rebooted…..same thing all over again.
Spent a good part of yesterday messing with bios setting and such but nothing worked. Came in this morning to get back onto the problem…..it magically worked for some reason. Can't explain it!
Has anyone else run into this same problem?
I've lost a fair bit of hair trying to make a 64bit forensics workstation.
My issue with firewire was getting my firewire800 card to work - there were no 64bit drivers for it.
USB2.0 worked fine, but if course I wanted firewire to work. Seems like most of my problems were driver related.
ok it sounds like your graphics card and your Firewire card are sharing the same I/O. This is not uncommon on new machines where the PCI slot, if there is one, is simply a mirror of the graphics card. So as you see much strangeness will happen.
Personally I have been using x64 Windows since it's first release, including Vista, and like you say getting drivers is the biggest problem but here are a few suggestions based on my experience.
1. Don't have high I/O devices sharing ANYTHING. Check in the BIOS or device manager when you plug in a new card and if it sharing with your NIC or Graphics card then move it on a slot and try again. Yes I know it is the 21st centuary but until we can start a fresh with the basic PC achitecture it is good to stick to the old rules.
2. Don't use the drivers that come with the Firewire cards unless you have to. The basic OHCI driver in Windows work just fine for any TI based Firewire device.