X-Drive II trouble

[where1]

I need some help with my XDrive 2. It was working fine until a few days ago.
Whenever I copy a CF card to the hard drive, all seems normal for a short period, then it starts beeping and an icon in the lower right corner of the display panel comes on. The icon is a rectangle with a short line at about 1/3 up from the bottom with an X over it.
When I hook up the USB to the computer, and turn the Xdrive on, the computer (running Windows XP Home Vesion) starts looking for it, but it takes a long, long time before it connects up. When it finally does connect, the CFxxxx folders are there, but empty. The CFxxxx folders from before this problem started are also there with subfolders and files in them, however I cannot copy them to the computer, or even to other folders on the Xdrive. I can read and copy files from a CF card ok.
I have also pressed the reset button several times, but that doesn't help at all.

Does anyone have any ideas what I may try next. Any help would be appreciated, I have a vacation coming up and would like to usr the Xdrive.

[CyberDyneSystems]

I'm thinking the drive is on its way out... can you even run a scandisk across USB???

Not in XP.. which won't even run Scandisk anymore :( (back to DOS chkdsk)

[RichardSimon]

According to the X-Drive manual, the symbol you describe means "Hard Disk Error". It sounds like the hard drive in your X-Drive unit is corrupted in some way. I'm not sure which disk utilities might work to diagnose the drive, but that is the best next step. Otherwise, you could replace the hard disk inside the X-Drive (easy to do, use any standard laptop internal drive).

I have noticed with my X-Drive that the unit is sensitive to being jarred during file transfer or access. The sensitivity probably depends on the hard disk installed in the unit.

Good luck!

[where1]

I attached the Xdrive to my daughters ME machine and was able to run scandisk. There was an unfixable problem. I was able to format the drive, and now it copies CF cards OK, but I can't get the data off the hard drive. I formatted again and ran scandisk thorough. Scandisk reported an error and said it couldn't fix it. It writes, but won't read. New hard drive time.

If I can't get it fixed before vacation, my daughters laptop will have to suffice.

Thanks folks for the help.

[evilenglishman]

--

[theoldmoose]

The Xs Drive II support site has utilities to download that you let you re-format the disk from a more recent Windows OS. There is also a firmware update that should help with handling long filenames, among other things.

Also, if you can get your hands on a Linux system (you could boot a Knoppix CD temporarily), you can see in the back of the Xs Drive II manual that there are some hints on mounting/using the drive under Linux. In fact, IIRC, it is the only documented way to mess with the drive's partition table. I had an old notebook drive I wanted to use and it had a recovery partition (with a backup of the Windows pre-load) as well as a hibernation partition (for suspend to disk) taking up a significant portion of the drive. Under Linux, using Linux's fdisk, I was able to delete all the partitions and remake a primary FAT32 partition. Then I formatted it with a DOS VFAT file system, and it was good to go.

[theoldmoose]

I got around to applying the firmware patch last night. In spite of claims on the web site, the firmware code doesn't seem to be able to function on Windows 2000. It starts, but complains that the proper drivers are not loaded and/or it can't find the drive to do the update.

So, I loaded the Win98 drivers on my Win98SE laptop, plugged the drive in there, and the firmware update ran without a hitch.

I then did some experimentation, by copying directories of files back and forth from the drive both to my local hard disk, and to a drive letter mounted from a file server.

On Windows 98SE, running USB 1.1, all the copies were stable, without any funny error messages.

On Windows 2000 Pro, as long as copied to/from the hard drive, or from the server mounted drive to the Xs Drive II, at USB 2.0 high speed, all was OK.

However, I'm still plagued by 'unsafe removal of device' messages and aborted copies if I attempt to copy from the Xs Drive II to a server mounted drive. This is annoying, to say the least, because I wish to put my RAW files on the file server, where they can be accessed easily by other machines in the household, for manipulation or backup.

I was under the impression at one point, that there might have been a problem with sharing interrupts between the USB 2.0 controller and one of the other motherboard peripherals. Out of the three controllers in the system, two of them are sharing interrupts with the AGP slot and the FireWire interface. I purposefully moved the Xs Drive II connection to the third controller, to avoid problems there, but I'm unsure if it has improved the situation any.

Finally, even after the firmware upgrade, there appear to be certain combinations of characters in long filenames that give the VxWorks kernel in the Xs Drive II fits. In particular, the presence of parentheses '()' embedded in the path handed to the drive during folder copy operations will cause an error that aborts the copy. If I create the target folder manually on the Xs Drive II, and drag 'n drop the offending file names into the open target folder, it works (go figure). One other filename oops that upsets the drive is trailing spaces before the '.extension' portion of the filename. For instance, 'abcdgoldfish .ogg' just blows it out of the water, in spite of the fact that Windows 2000 Pro accepts this as a perfectly legal filename.

Too bad that the Xs Drive II is such a buggy implementation, as far as the file system goes, and it may also have some sort of channel time-out problem on high-speed transfers to the host PC, which manifest itself as the 'unsafe removal of device' bug. It just generally makes me quite nervous about trusting it to safely transport irreplaceable images for me, if I use it on an extended trip.

Also, the Vosonic folks aren't very helpful about fixing problems. Aside from a brief FAQ on their web site, and what appear to be a very lax attitude about properly versioning and naming their download files, there bottom line is, "If you can't resolve a problem, contact your dealer." Right. Like as if ComputerGeeks (or whoever you iOrdered this thing from) will be able to help. All they have on their site are links pointing back to the Vosonic site.

The Xs Drive II is a good idea, but it really needs proper support. Apparently it was just 'tossed over the fence', and Vosonic has pretty much washed their hands of it. If you look at the documentation that comes with the firmware updater, for instance, you will see that it looks like they are re-shipping something they got from a 3rd party (Wind River? -- but not even Wind River ever put out something that bad-looking), where they cut three pages of documentation out and circle a couple of menu items. There is a reference to "Make certain that you have the proper values in device.txt, etc. -- see page 4". There is no page 4. And so on.

Other folks have given up on the portable hard drive approach, and use one or more units that directly burn CDs from the media. If you burn a couple of CD's each, and put one each in your checked luggage and carryon, you stand a chance of getting your images back all in one piece. And if a CD gets scratched or lost, at the worst you've lost a day's worth of images, instead of your whole trip (from a hard drive crash, or stolen laptop or image tank).

[where1]

I tried a Win98SE machine. I formated the drive OK, but when I run Scandisk thorough, it justs locks up at cluster 487. I can copy a CF to it, but still get the Hard Disk Error Idicator icon. When I try to transfer the files to the computer, it just gets stuck on the third file. These are RAW type files, and I can't display them on the 98 machine, so I don't know if they are intact or not. I contacted the seller, and I am sending in the XDrive unit for warranty coverage.

Thanks all for your advise.

[CyberDyneSystems]

I'm thinking the drive is on its way out... can you even run a scandisk across USB???

Not in XP.. which won't even run Scandisk anymore :( (back to DOS chkdsk)

you should be able to right click the drive and use utilities to check the disk for errors, defrag etc

Your right Evil,. it's only when it is the system or C: drive that you have to revert to chkdsk...

Where,

If your disk utility is returning bad sectors,. that is all she wrote my frind.. the hard drive in the X=drive has physical problems...

Yes sometimes you can keep going with a drive that has bad sectors.. but these days with such huge drives running so fast,. my expeirience has been that at the first sighn of bad sectors,. the drive is just done for. :(

[The Photo Tuell]

There is a reference to "Make certain that you have the proper values in device.txt, etc. -- see page 4". There is no page 4.

Yea I noticed that too.

Also the Vosonic website changed in the last couple of days. The driver downloads changed, not necessarily updated though...

They added a 1.9 firmware, but the file name is the same except it's a RAR instead of a ZIP...and it's corrupted, I can't extract any of the files.

They took out the _17 version that I had previously downloaded and installed (months ago) and put the _14 back in, also. http://www.vosonic.com/Manager/Drivers/XsDriveIIVP2060_14.zip

Just a couple days ago I downloaded "XsDriveIIVP2060_21.zip" and it's not there anymore. It didn't work anyways, said it was never connected.

Guess I'll just stay with my current firmware/driver and hope it keeps working hehe.

[OviV]

They are showing an updated firmware on the site (http://www.vosonic.com/index.php?php_mode=downloads) for the VP 2060 and they claim it will work with win98, 2000, and xp. Nothing for the Pro yet but I hope they will update that too.

Ovi

[where1]

I got the X-Drive back last week with a new drive installed in it. Everything seems fine. I pushed my vacation off (not because of the X-drive) to the end of this month, so now I am ready. :)

[robvonk]

@theoldmoose and others with the same problems

I and a friend of mine had the unsafe removal messages too. I fixed it by upgrading to a new motherboard :) From via to nforce.

We changed the driver from my friends computer from the one that was supplied by the usb card to one from microsoft.

I use this seqence with disconnecting:

open explorer, this computer
right click on the removable disk item and choose eject
right click on CF disk and choose eject (if u used the CF reader)

Then i open the safe removal devices window from the tray
select the X-drive make sure no devices (drives etc.) are shown
press stop and it works now

[theoldmoose]

Having gone through 3 motherboards in two years (the first two had bad caps -- I was unlucky enough to get two of those in a row, from two different manufacturers), I'm not anxious to swap motherboards yet again :roll:

In any event the motherboard I'm using now is very recent, is using the standard Intel chipset (not Via or anybody else's 'almost compatible' crap), and I've tried the Intel chipset drivers, the drivers posted by ASUS for the motherboard, and the Microsoft drivers.

None of them work reliably for me.

I realize that the problem seems to be isolated to my motherboard only (the Xs Drive II seems to work everyplace else I've tested it), but it is really frustrating that the Xs Drive II doesn't work with this motherboard.

Every single other USB device I have works flawlessly with this motherboard, USB 1.1 or USB 2.0. The Xs Drive II is the only thing that fails on this motherboard. :cry:

I'd sooner toss the $99 Xs Drive II and find something that works with my systems, than vice-versa.