1394 PCI card freezes my Dell D600 when detected

[irelandmc]

Hi all.

I have a Dell D600 laptop and docking station running windows XP pro. Until today I had a three port firewire card in the PCI slot of the docking station. Today I tried to replace it with a combination USB2/Firewire card. When the system boots the new hardware bubble comes up and first recognizes the PCI to USB controller and everything goes fine. As soon as it recognizes the 1394 controller, the system freezes hard. I've tried several times with no luck. If I boot off of the docking station everything works just dandy. Something about that firewire controller is locking up my system. Anyone ever seen this before, or know how to get around it?

Thanks!

 

[Baez]

Find the newest driver for the card first. When it's trying to install it, something with the driver is freezing the computer. Try installing the new driver and see if the problem persists.

 

[irelandmc]

Well a little investigation revealed that there are no 1394 controller drivers. The driver, per the IEEE 1394 standard, is part of the operating system. This would explain why my previous 1394 card worked without instalation of a driver.

The card in question is an adaptec DuoConnect 3020. Adaptec does have a driver out there for the USB side of the card, but installation of this driver had no effect on the problem. I'm beginning to believe that this card is simply incompatible with this specific application, as the card works fine in a desktop.

Unless anyone has any clever ideas, I think I might just resign myself to finding another use for my PCI slot.

Thanks to all who pondered for me.