Thinkpads Forum

I have a couple of external firewire drives I want to use. I notice the Advanced Dock does not have firewire. No problem - I'll buy a card for the single slot in the Advanced Dock.

First issue is the Advanced Dock is now PCI Express.

Second issue is that it seems to be 8x or 16x (not sure which).

So there are only two FW-800 capable PCI-E cards I could find. I purchased the SIG FW-800 3 port PCI-E card. Its a PCI-E 1x card.

Installation was no problem - it fit. And you are SUPPOSED to be able to run a 1x card in a 8/16x slot.

But the T60 will not boot with the card installed. Drive spins, then nothing.

First, I thought "oh the metal backing of the enclosure is touching the card". Putting in a piece of stiff paper allowed it to get to the initial screen. But nothing I could do would get it past that. BIOS wouldn't run (I got a screen of odd colours in the shape of the splash screen), and I could not boot to Windows.

So, what magic is there in getting a PCI-E card to work installed into the Advanced Dock?

Has anyone tried running a PCI-E card in the Advanced Dock?

It's an x16 slot sitting on an x1 riser card. You will only get x1 performance with the Advanced Dock.

As for booting, try looking at your boot order in the BIOS setup.

Others here can speak to their experience with x16 video cards in the slot (most were successful - a few cards caused boot problems), but I wanted to let you know that I've been running a 1x PCIe card with no problems: Powercolor's tv tuner card based on the ATI Rage Theatre Pro 550 chipset.

No problems and I have a Media Center Edition notebook now!

-Todd

Has anyone found a FW 800 PCIE card that is known to work?

My first attempt with the SIIG card didn't work.

Although they didn't test PCI-E cards, some might suffer from it too... http://www.rme-audio.com/english/techin ... 0alert.htm

Winchester wrote:Has anyone found a FW 800 PCIE card that is known to work?

My first attempt with the SIIG card didn't work.

While it's not a PCIe solution, I have the Expresscard Firewire 800 working in the expresscard/54 slot on my T60. It has both a 400 and an 800 connection.

-Todd