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CL56 Firewire Hard Disk

post #1 of 3
4/8/07 at 3:15pm
Thread Starter 
Has anyone gotten an external hard disk to work with the Compal CL56 when plugged in to the 4 pin firewire port?

I'm trying to use a 320GB Acomdata drive. It works fine on my desktop using firewire and it works fine on the notebook using USB 2.0.

When plugged into the notebook's firewire port, the drive is not recognized at all. In device manager, the VIA OHCI driver provided by Microsoft is reported to be installed without problems. I am running SP2 with firewire hotfixes installed (885222 and 904412).

Possible problems I can think of are as follows:
* The CL56 uses a VIA VT6301S IEEE 1394 controller. I have seen some reports that XP SP2 breaks support for VIA 1394 chipsets. For example: http://forums.viaarena.com/messagevi...&enterthread=y

* I'm using a 6 pin to 4 pin adapter. I guess the adapter could be faulty. The drive is idependently powered so, lack of power via the 1394 port should not be an issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions to get firewire to work with the drive?
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post #2 of 3
4/9/07 at 2:42am
oxford chipset firewire works fine on cl56 xp sp2 here. make sure your drivers are up to date and find out which chipset your enclosure carries. often it is just that you have an incompatible/inferior chipset or one that is better suited for usb2.
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post #3 of 3
4/11/07 at 7:37pm
Thread Starter 
Acomdata uses an Initio chipset.

I fixed the problem: It was the connection that was at fault... looks like the 6 pin to 4 pin adapter wasn't working well. I bought a 6 pin to 4 pin cable at monoprice.com for $3 and now the drive works fine.

So, in conclusion, it appears that the CL56's firewire port works fine with external hard disks under XP SP2.
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