Question: Oxford 911 bridgeboard problems

This thread is about the Western Digital Caviar SE WD3000JB - hard drive - 300 GB - ATA-100. Click here to see full specs

After my old system failed completely and getting a new computer with Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit w/SP1, I have been having problems with my Western Digital EIDE HDDs mounted in an external storage case with Oxford 911 bridgeboards.

On the old system I had one dvd drive and three EIDE HDDs mounted in a generic enclosure with 4 bays and two bridgeboards. This setup was running perfectly under Win XP Pro w/SP2 for four years.


If I connect one HP dvd LightScribe drive to one board, it is always recognized and starts properly. So far so good.

However, if a WD HDD drive is mounted and daisy-chained via that board, neither device will start.

Okay, so I run the dvd drive on one board by itself.


If I connect a single WD HDD to the other board, the drive is recognized but will not start. After some troubleshooting I get to the point where Windows tells me the driver software is loaded but encounters a problem when trying to run. If I connect a second HDD to this same bridgeboard, the device is not even recognized.


Western Digital is of no help whatsoever. They simply say they do not support IDE-firewire bridgeboard connections. In other words, if an internal drive is not connected internally, they deny all responsibility. With external drives, all they will say is that there are "occasional" problems with WD external HDDs running under Vista 64 bit.

The computer manufacturer (HP) is equally unhelpful and clueless.

I consider that both vendors have less-than-supportive Tech Support.


Microsoft has been working with me (that's what got the dvd drive working) but still has not come up with a solution.



I am considering flashing the bridgeboard firmware to v4.0 but before I do, does any one have another solution?

1. It's not usually a good idea to daisy-chain different kinds of devices. Hard drives should be chained to other hard drives, DVD burners to other DVD burners, etc. Firewire chaining is theoretically supposed to work no matter what the device, but reality tells us different.

2. If you know what you are doing, then yes, update the firmware. That would have been the first thing to do before bothering to spend all those hours with tech support.

3. If you have time to do some studying, you might also check the configuration of the bridge board after you update the firmware. The Oxford Updater will give you access to some of the boards low-level config settings that may affect it's speed and chaining abilities.

4. No drive manufacturer on the planet supports the installation of their internal drives into enclosures. That's standard and nothing unusual. It's outside the recommended usage guidelines. If you want to do these kinds of things, you have to learn to provide your own support.

5. Check the power supply for the enclosure(s). The number one cause of flaky enclosure operation is a lack of adequate power or a faulty PSU.

Thanks for your detailed reply. Let's take a look at these points:

1.) It's not a matter of daisy-chaining different devices......I have been trying to link two WD HDDs of the same type with no success. Besides, the physical configuration I am trying to get working under Vista is the same configuration that worked perfectly for four years under Win XP Pro w/SP2. And BTW, that configuration has one dvd drive and one HDD chained together. Worked perfectly under XP.

This suggests to me that it is not a hardware conflict, but something in firmware or software. Or the way Vista handles the interfacing.


2.) As you so kindly provided in another post, I have the firmware downloads for Oxford 911. However when I ran the updater, it returned an error message that "no 1394 host card was found". I am puzzled by this since the new motherboard has Firewire integrated into it; I also have a PCI card with extra Firewire ports installed. Both controllers are recognized by Device Manager and shown to be operating correctly, which I have verified by getting the dvd drive to run from both the PCI card and the integrated 1394 ports. I have also tried reinstalling the drivers for each controller, but it hasn't helped.

3.) See Note 2. I can't get the updater to detect my 1394 controllers, so I can't access the Oxford boards to install any possible updates. Any ideas? I contacted the home corporation for Oxford, and they will not let single users like me access their Technical Support. And FWDepot no longer actively operates their website.

4.) I can't agree completely with this statement. Western Digital will support drives installed into enclosures as long as they are theirs. That's because they have integrated bridgeboards with their drives as part of the design. And while I understand their reluctance regarding user-determined setups, this is a common enough practice that they could at least try to help. WDC basically told me "Don't bother us". So I am certainly learning to do my own support (he says with a wry grin).

As for computer manufacturers, if they integrate Firewire ports into their products, it implies they expect that customers will use them. In my research I am finding many complaints with Vista users that external devices such as cameras and camcorders are also showing the same kind of problems working with Vista. HP also brushed me off by saying "It's a Windows problem." They did the same thing when I had a problem with my OfficeJet duplex printing. That problem did turn out to be a driver problem, and HP Users Forums has a solution, which HP Tech Support never bothers to tell anyone about. If you find the solution, it's by pure luck and dogged determination.

5.) How can I check the power supply? What do I look for?

Once again, thanks for your thoughtful reply!

P.S. One more thing I've learned: next time I go with USB instead of Firewire.

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Last edited by pdef1949; 05-05-2009 at 15:52.

Think we all CD/DVD Freaks better forget Oxford 911 ever existed.
Read here abouth my 911 experience (more then 4y's ago).

Wow, that's quite a thread.

I never had any such problems with the Oxford 911 bridgeboards in my enclosure when running XP Pro with SP2 on a Dell Dimension 2400. My original setup was three Western Digital HDDs and one Mad Dog dvd-rw drive in an external case, connected via Fiorewire to a PCI 1394 board I added to the Dell (which did not have 1394 ports).

It worked perfectly for nearly four years until I started having the beginnings of motherboard problems a month ago. The motherboard finally died, and a replacement was nearly the same cost as a new computer so I opted to go new, because HP integrates 2 1394 ports into the machine I bought (Pavilion a6700f).

As it turns out, connecting the external drives to the integrated port doens't help either.

I have spent several weeks trying to fix this problem and may just bite the bullet and get two USB/1394b bridgeboards and a 1394b PCI card. That way I can save the enclsoure and trays, and if the newer (and faster) version of Firewire doesn't work, USB2.0 will.

Okay, I tried a later version of the Oxford firmware updater utility, with no success. For some reason, the program will not detect either the embedded 1394 controller on my mother board, or the PCI card host controller.

After three weeks of this and not being able to get my Western Digital EIDE hard drives working through Firewire, I am giving up on updating the two Oxford 911 bridgeboards I have in an external storage case. I don't even know if the update will help, but it's a moot point since I can't force flash an upgrade.

Is anyone using Western Digital EIDE hard drives connected via Firewire with Vista 64 bit? If new boards with 911+, 912 or 922 would help, that's what I can do.

One thing I forgot to mention was that bugs started to emerge in Windows XP SP3 that specifically caused problems with Firewire. You jumped from SP2 to Vista, so you never noticed them. The point being that this may not be an Oxford or bridgeboard problem at all:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f143/window...1394-a-260143/

Here are a couple of MS KB articles that might be related to your problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934314

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930495

I'm not sure if MS Support already pointed those out to you.

Lastly, in doing some net searching, I'm seeing tons of problems that people are having using Firewire and Vista, so you're not alone. It may well be a MS problem.

Actually, I tried XP SP3 before my old machine failed. I had the same problems of sometimes not getting HDDs recognized or not starting. They said problems with external 1394 HDDs were common with SP3, so Microsoft helped me uninstall SP3 and go back to SP2. I had no further problems after that, except I had to do a low level format of one of the HDDs to recover a corrupted NTFS file system. There is a program MS recommended that prevents SP3 from installing via Automatic Updates.

I wonder.....is this Firewire problem because 1394 was originally Apple technology and there is some prejudice within MS to make the Windows OS easily and fully compatible with it? Maybe the internal resources just aren't being committed.....or maybe this is my MS prejudice.



After having done a lot of research on the web, I too have found that Vista-Firewire device problems are very common even with SP1. Therefore I am not convinced this is an Oxford 911 problem after all. But since I couldn't get the Oxford firmware updater to run correctly, I couldn't prove anything.

An interesting side note is that when I talked to Western Digital recently, they admitted that Vista SP1 has not solved all the Firewire incompatibilities yet.....WDC has external Firewire hard drives that have some problems running under Vista. Perhaps because WDC doesn't write their own drivers, they use Microsoft drivers.



Microsoft Tech Support did suggest a couple of Hotfixes but I don't remember the specific numbers. One of them did fix the dvd drive via Firewire, but did not help the HDD problems. I'll check out your links.


Personally, I'm of the opinion that Vista SP1 is still not completely Firewire-friendly and that better drivers are needed. Maybe SP2 will address this, maybe not. Maybe device manufacturers will address this and write ehir own (better) drivers, maybe not.

I still hope that SP2 will be better, or maybe Windows 7 will. I'm told that even the initial RC of Win 7 is better than Vista SP1 (three years after release).

Once again, thanks for your help with this issue!

Yes, many people have speculated the same thing.

BTW, I forgot to ask, but are you sure your bridgeboard has regular Oxford 911 chipsets, or newer Oxford 911 Plus chipsets? That could tell us something different about the problem. You also have to make sure you are using the right updater and firmware.

Yes, I did check and they are the 911 chipset, NOT the 911+ boards. I have tried three updaters...two have the v 1.64 updater and the other had a beta version of the v2.1(?) updater. Neither one detects my bridgeboards. The v 1.64 does not even recognize my host card (which is on a 64-bit bus).

While I am still pursuing this problem with Microsoft, I have largely given up since no one seems to have a handle on this problem. I am now speculating that 64 bit systems are simply not completely friendly to the 911 interface when used with WDC (and other) HDDs. I say that because dvd and cd-rom drives are fine with the 911/EIDE-to-1394 interface.

I also suspect that the Vista 6.0.6001.18000 driver does not handle Western Digital HDDs via Firewire all that well, even without the 911 interface. This is what a tech at WDC hinted at, since they are still experiencing some problems with their external Firewire drives and Vista.


From what I gather in several phone calls to WDC, they are not about to write their own drivers since they consider this to be a Microsoft problem. Of course, MS considers it WDC's problem and consumers are caught in the middle. I am hoping Vista SP2 will resolve this weak compatibility, or that Windows 7 does.....I'm not holding my breath though.

You can load Windows 7 (release candidate) in a VM or on a test machine and try it out:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win.../download.aspx

Here's an update on my thread:

I got the idea today that perhaps Western Digital had a separate driver available for their Firewire external drives, and it might help with my problem. As I searched for available software, I kept running across an interesting point: all the WDC software I found failed to list Vista 64-bit as a supported OS. Some older models don't list Vista at all and even among the XP versions, 64-bit isn't mentioned.

The last time I spoke with WDC Tech Support, they mentioned that even their factory-designed Firewire external drives are experiencing problems with Vista and 64-bit OS's. I have also heard this complaint on other Vista user forums.

So now I am speculating that WDC hard drives are not entirely compatible with Vista and 64-bit OS's and the standard 6.0.6001.18000 disk driver that comes with Windows Vista. And I don't believe WDC intends to do anything about it....the market segment of Vista 64-bit users is probably considered too small to warrant the effort.

Once again I am speculating, but I think Microsoft knows about this problem and also considers the 64-bit market too small to bother with. And I should mention that XP SP3 intorduced some new Firewire and external HDD incompatibilities. So Microsoft's skirts aren't exactly clean on this issue either.

However, MS Tech Support has been working with me on this problem and as of yesterday they offered me a free Vista 32-bit installation disk and free phone support.

This is an unexpected bonus because I purchased an HP computer with Vista pre-installed. MS does not offer free phone support for an OEM installation.....it was supposed to come from the OEM. Through frustrating and persistent effort I found HP free Tech Support is ill-equipped to deal with anything except basic Vista troubles. To get to any higher level tech people you need to pay whether or not your problem is solved. (Based on customer after sales support I expect I've bought my first and last HP computer.)

The explanation for the lack of free phone support from MS is that MS has no control over what an OEM does with their versions of the OS. That's also why they leave it up to the OEM to provide support. But God only knows what HP did with it on various models....even their Tech Support doesn't seem to know (or admit they know).

Here's an example: when I installed my HP All-In-One Office Deskjet printer, I could not get duplex printing to work. HP Tech Support essentially told me that duplex printing was not supported by Vista. This turned out to be anything but true......it was two simple issues, both easily resolvable. It turned out that to select duplex printing the user has to be signed in as administrator (I thought I was and this is part of my Vista learning curve)....presto, duplex printing available. The second issue was that the printing on the back of the page was upside down and the toggle for this was inoperative. It is an HP driver problem and the new driver was available on HP Users Forums for free. But HP seems to be clueless about this and is simply blowing its customers off by making this oversight a (false) Microsoft problem. I was not even referred to the Users Forum, I was left to find this on my own.


So while I still haven't solved the HDD Firewire troubles yet, here's what I've learned: Microsoft customer support has been very good...Western Digital has been poor and HP support thas been very poor. Lastly, Vista 64-bit is simply not worth the trouble for most users.

BTW, through a little bit more searching I've found that PCI Firewire 800 cards with 64-bit Vista support are available and it's my guess that an Oxofrd 912 bridgeboard might also get around the 64-bit issue. But I'm waiting for the 32-bit version of Vista before I spent over $100 for new hardware that might not be needed.

We'll see what happens when I get Vista 32-bit installed.