Soundblaster Firewire and an external HD

[Palhil]

Hello. I was wondering if you nice people could help.

This is probably a simple problem and I'm going to end up looking like a fool, but here goes.

I've just got a new Western Digital 250GB "My Book" with Firewire interface. I followed the simple instructions and installed the drive via USB first. Everything went fine and I could see the drive under "My Computer". I then decided to connect the drive to the Firewire port on my Soundblaster Audigy Live. The computer again recognized the new drive and went through the driver installation. (Although, as a side note, for some reason it never does it fully automatically I always have to tell it to specifically look in the "inf" folder. It does that with everything, I've never understood why.) However, the problem I have now is that the drive does not show up under "My Computer" whilst attached to the Firewire. The light on the front of the drive lights up so it's getting some kind of signal through the Firewire.

So what have I done wrong? Do I need new drivers for either the sound card or the hard drive? I have SP2 if that's of any use.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers.

[this_is_gav]

Doubt it's the firewire port needing drivers, and equally the hard drive. Is it showing up as anything in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Manager > Disk Manager? If you have networked drives, then XP usually assigns hard drives the same letter as a mapped drive.

[ultim8um]

If recollection serves me right the firewire port on soundblaster cards is completely unpowered and thus will only work with devices that do not attempt to draw any power over the firewire connection. This may lead to problems with storage devices etc as they do tend to draw power over the cable... Stick to using it on USB2 and all will be well

[Palhil]

Thanks for the help.

I plugged it into the USB, changed the drive letter, plugged it back into the Firewire and updated the driver for the HD. Then it appeared under "My Computer" Great!

Thanks once again.