Firewire drive failure

[pilihp]

I have a pci card with two FW ports. I have always used just the one port to supply an external sound device and looped through from that to a Lacie external drive. As an experiment, instead of looping through, I connected the hard drive directly to the second port on the PCI card. There seemed to be a conflict with the two FW devices so I reconnected back as normal. Now the drive cannot be accessed! It appears as a drive with a letter but windows says it must be formatted!
Whatever happened? Is the drive damaged and why? Might it just be the FW circuitry in the drive's enclosure?
Any help is much appreciated. OS is XPpro SP2
Philip

 

[kestrel1]

It could be that the drive has become corrupt, however I would first try to remove the drivers for the firewire card & reboot to reinstall the drivers, this may or may not help, but worth a try.

 

[pilihp]

kestrel1, thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately it is still no go and I tried it with another PC with the same result.
Did I do something wrong in connecting the drive to the other PCI card port?

 

[kestrel1]

It would seem that something went wrong whilst both ports were in use. maybe a lack of power caused the fault & has damaged the drive in someway. Are you able to remove the drive from the enclosure & connect it directly to your machine? This would determine wether the drive is at fault or the enclosure.
If it is still under warranty, you shouldn't remove it from the enclosure, as you may void the warranty.
You could always try some file recovery software, but I am not sure that this will really help, as the drive is not being seen correctly.