Firewire drive shenanegans.

[Jon Best]

Here's an interesting one. I've got two HTFS (mac) formatted firewire drives that work fine on a mac. I have an Adaptec firewire card in a PC that works fine with a video camera and a MOTU 828 (used those two just for testing). The drives are completely unrecognized as existing by my Adaptec/PC setup. Not there, not in disk management, etc. So, Opus, I took your advice (that I should have thought of...) and yanked one of the drives out of it's shell and partitioned and formatted it NTFS as an IDE drive. Works fine as an IDE drive, but back in the firewire case, it's still not recognized.

*Then* I took that formatted drive over to my brother in law's house, and hooked it up to the Mac.

Everything on the drive comes up just fine on his mac, including all of the previous Mac files (audio). They all play fine, open fine, whatever. Remember, this is *after* I had formatted and partitioned this drive out with the PC!

I always thought a full format included an erase, guess not...

I'm going to try a different firewire card I have around here, I just thought is was interesting that I could format a disk NTFS and still have it work as HFS on a mac, completely intact...

 

[Opus2000]

Umm...at that point I wonder if you truly formatted the correct drive or not....I would check to make sure that you didn't format another drive by mistake.
What you may need to do is use the Disk Management feature within Win2k or XP to se if they have been allocated to a dynamic disk or not. It may show up as a non allocated disc in some way and you will need to update it.
Let me know
Opus

 

[Jon Best]

Weird, huh? Yep, the only other drive (single partition) I had in that box was the boot drive. Drive shows up fine in Disk Manager(as an IDE drive out of the firewire case), I even partitioned it out to a few sections before formatting them individually. I did leave a little tail end of unformatted space- I generally have to, as I keep a consistent partition size among all of my audio drives. It was probably 30 megs or so. I'm wondering if that's where some of the important HTFS info lives, and whether the writing of partitions and stuff just happened over mac files I did not subsequently try to open. I'm going to do the same thing again, just for kicks, when I get the drive back.

Originally posted by Opus2000:
Umm...at that point I wonder if you truly formatted the correct drive or not....I would check to make sure that you didn't format another drive by mistake.
What you may need to do is use the Disk Management feature within Win2k or XP to se if they have been allocated to a dynamic disk or not. It may show up as a non allocated disc in some way and you will need to update it.
Let me know
Opus

 

[Jon Best]

Oh, as for dynamic vs. basic, the partitions are all formatted as basic disks (volumes)- I haven't had a need for dynamic volumes. I don't really see what good it would do me for audio. Is that the 'dynamic' you're talking about? They certainly all have drive letters...