please can someone help?

[piseas]

I posted this earlier this week too.


I have an HP Pavillion with an AMD Athlon 1900+ 1.6GHz running WIN XP Home edition.

I recently purchased a 300gb hard drive from Seagate and I needed a firewire / USB 2.0 for the drive. I first purchased a cheap Q-stor Firewire PCI card that shut my CPU down whenever I started up the external drive. The card was recognized by the CPU, but the shutdowns were unavoidable. After the shutdown the CPU could not fully boot to Windows with the card installed. I would take the card out of the PCI slot and it worked fine.

I now have a D-link PCI USB 2.0 / Firewire combo card that is not recognized by my system at all. The driver that came with the box installed fine, but still no card...

AGH!

What do I need to do so that I can start using my new external drive with my CPU?
All suggestions are welcome.
Many thanks.

 

[Trifid]

I would of said more like a PSU problem, the PSU can't send enough watts to everthing in the system, and a hdd. is quite demanding, and along with the PCI card sucking up more juice...

Just to eliminate the hdd. try using the hdd on another PC.

Do you not have a USB2.0 slot on your PC?

 

[piseas]

My CPU is a few years old so I don't think it has a USB 2.0 slot. I would check that in the device manager right?

Yes the hard drive has worked on other CPUs just fine.

I'm sorry could you explain PSU and how I might utilize that? (still a virgin techie)


Thank you very much

 

[RicoDirenzo]

PSU is an acronym for Power Supply Unit....It's the thingy in the back of your puter that the power cord plus into (dangling participle notwihtstanding).

 

[HAVOC]

THe older generation refers to a PC as a CPU. Just to let all of you youngin's know. I took me years to get my father to stop calling his PC a CPU.

Younger Generation
CPU - Central Processing Unit
PC = Personal Computer

Older Generation
CPU - My Computer
PC = Prostate Cancer

 

[HAVOC]

Oh, yeah... To answer your cry for help:
PLEASE LIST THE MODEL TYPE OF YOUR HP PAVILLION

I'm assuming that the 300GIG HDD you are talking about is external. That being assumed, you would need firewire support to get anykind of performance out of that drive. You didn't have any firewire ports on your motherboard or other devices so you needed to install a Firewire PCI card. With the PCI card installed your PC would shutdown automatically. (I believe that first, this could be a IRQ conflict with that PCI slot that you installed the firewire card into. There are several ways to fix this problem. Mostly this can be fixed by movig the PCI card to a different PCI slot. The other ways involve some adjustments in the BIOS.

THe second problem you are facing, seems to be that you didn't properly uninstall the other Firewire card drivers before installing the second firewire card and drivers. If this was done properly, when you installed the second card, rebooted, windows would recongnize that you have installed a new card and then it would have asked you to install the drivers and the new software. At which time / If you installed the new card & drivers properly, you would have gotten the same reboot/freeze/lockup problem you had with the first one. Due to the IRQ conflict.

The last cause could be the PSU, but i doubt it. I'm sticking with the IRQ conflict here.

 

[piseas]

Thank you again for the input, The model type I am not sure?? Let me know where I can find that info & I will post ASAP.

I tried all three of my PCI slots which each failed multiple times. However once or twice the computer loaded up with the card installed (before i ended up returning that QStor card in exchange for another-D-LINK) but as soon as I powered on the external (SEAGATE) hard drive the computer shutdown completely.

How can I get more information about the IRQ conflict & resolving the inproper unistall of the first firewire card? Is it a compatibility issue? Do some firewire cards work better for certain functions like audio recording vs. gaming?

many thanks

 

[RicoDirenzo]

Go to Control Panel: System: Then Divice Manager: Find the PCI firewire card you removed. and delete it. Find the new PCI card and reinstall the drivers. Make sure the Firewire Ext. Drive is powered down after reintalling the drivers. Power the drive back on....should recognize it. About IRQ...it is highly unlikely that there would be an IRQ conflict as It is hard to imagine that that firewire card would be much of a bandwidth hog like a DAW audio pci card......otherwise????????

 

[piseas]

hmmm

that's funny, my Device manager does not show my old firewire PCI card! I tried installing the new drivers and it still wont recognize my new card!!!

 

[joshd]

is the external hd bus powered, or does it have a power supply of its own?

a question of my own: if a device is not bus powered, does it use any wattage ATALL from the power supply?