Thinkpads Forum

I am new to ThinkPads. For last decade I've worked on Macs. Before that it was the DOS environment. Last week I bought an IBM certified t61p.

I just plugged a Firewire 800 drive into the front Firewire port on my t61p. I was surprised that the drive was recognized. Isn't that port 400?

The t61p runs XP Pro SP3 fully updated.

The above mentioned drive has a 400 port but I was connected via it's 800 port.

Drive is formatted exFAT.

I also can connect to the drive using a Firewire 800 PCMCIA card but that card was not installed when I connected to the front port.

What is going on here?

FireWire 800 devices and FireWire 400 devices are generally compatible, aside from a non-fitting plug. If, using the correct cable, one plugs a FireWire 400 device into a FireWire 800 device, or vice-versa, the device will operate at whatever the lowest speed between the two peers is (in both of those situations, the FireWire 800 device would drop down to 400 to match the other device). The FireWire 800 plug just has additional data lines for double the bandwidth, but is architecturally the same.

As you can see from this thread my firewire 800 drive was showing up in XP on my t61p. A few months back I upgraded from XP to W7. Now the drive doesn't mount or show up in disk manager.

It showed up in disk manager yesterday but only after it had been plugged in for a while. The drive works perfectly in USB,

I have tried the front firewire port and also a PCI adapter card. Nothing works.

Any ideas?

You might need to use different firewire drivers. Win7's firewire stack is missing many features.

Try ubcore http://www.unibrain.com/downloads/

If it doesn't work, try googling for older versions.

Turns out this was a false alarm.The t61p with W7 64 bit does connect to firewire drives...sort of, sometimes, depending.

The problem was that even with a power adapter and a firewire cable connected this was somehow not enough to make my new G-tech mini drives spin up on the t61p. They spin up fine on my Mac, even with just firewire bus power.

This seems to be a new feature, perhpads to prevent them spinning for days one end when you shut your computer down but don't unplug power from the drives. They seem to require both power from an adapter and to be connected via firewire before they will spin up. Older g-tech minis do spin up with just the power adapter so that when I connect to the laptop they are seen. But newer ones won't spin up with the adapter power and firewire connection when connected to the t61p.

So, since the drive doesn't spin up, of course the computer doesn't see it.

Is this a problem with the Windows drivers or G-tech, the drive manufacturer? Would the drivers recommended by the previous poster solve this problem?

So how do I get the newer G-tech drives to spin up?

G-tech says I need to contact Lenovo and see if there is a chipset update. I'm not sure what this is. I posted on the forum at Lenovo but haven't heard yet.

Where would i get the chipset updates? Does this sound like a good solution?