Laptop External Firewire CD-ROM drives - compaptible with Desktops ?

[thenoo]

I have a Dell Latitude X200 Laptop which was supplied with an external CD-ROM drive which plugs into a Firewire Port on the Laptop and works OK.

The Laptop has W2K Pro installed

This CD-ROM , when plugged into the Firewire Port on my XP Pro Desktop gives a garbled output and , when plugged in at Bootup , also caused frequent re-boots on the Desktop .

Is this result due to the different OS's between the two machines or is there something else causing this effect ?

I thought a Firewire Appliance would work with OK if plugged into any other Firewire port .

B.N.

 

[tf1]

Well it certainly should be portable between any PC or MAC fitted with firewire ports. My motherboard has a VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller and uses the standard Windows XP controller and network drivers. It works fine.

Try deleting the 1394 controller and network driver in Device Manager, reboot and let Windows rediscover and install the drivers again.


Regards: tf1

 

[thenoo]

I'll certainly try that and see what happens.

One of the reasons I asked here is that I wondered whether there would be any fundemental incompatibilities between a laptop firewire peripheral ( i.e. in this case the external CD-ROM drive which came with my laptop ) and firewire peripherals suppplied to work with desktops .

From your reply I gather you maintain this shouldn't be the case .

I'll post back with the results of your suggestion.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[thenoo]

Just another point which "tfi"s reply has prompted and which I forgot to mention in my reply to him.

I've just noticed that I have two IEEE Firewire Controllers in DM , an

OHCI COMPLIANT IEEE1394 HOST CONTROLLER and a
VIA OHCI COMPLIANT IEEE1394 HOST CONTROLLER.

Would the fact that there are two controllers here be significant with this problem ? Should I uninstall both and see what happens ?

 

[tf1]

Possibly it will help. If there are two FW devices, if you delete them and reboot, Windows will reinstall both. See what happens.



Regards: tf1

 

[bcastner]

...I wondered whether there would be any fundemental incompatibilities between a laptop firewire peripheral ( i.e. in this case the external CD-ROM drive which came with my laptop ) and firewire peripherals suppplied to work with desktops.

You are absolutely right in your thinking, but:

There are a lot of dedicated and proprietary aspects to notebook computers. And I suspect you just hit one of them.