Firewire Won't Detect Camcorder

April 18, 2008 7:48 AM

Totally boring firewire question: I had to reinstall windows xp, and now the system won't see my camcorder.

It's a Panasonic GS-120 connected through firewire to an HP desktop running a slimmed-down version of SP2. In the device manager, I see a "Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller" with up-to-date drivers, but plugging the camera into either of the firewire ports doesn't bring up the plug-and-play notification. I'm using a 6-to-4 pin cable. The same camera is detected without problems when I connect it to a Vista laptop with a 4-to-4 pin cable.

I searched pretty hard for drivers etc but googling this stuff is a complete mess. Thanks for any ideas on what to try to fix this.

posted by muckster to computers & internet (4 comments total)

sometimes I will go in and delete the device such as all you 1394 stuff, in the device manager. then I reboot it. that has fixed similar issues with USB and Firewire card drivers before.

also, what do you mean by slimmed down?

do you have other firewire devices to test that hardware with? like something you can hook to the computer you are having a problem with to see if it is just the computer, or the camera, or the cable.
posted by Amby72 at 7:56 AM on April 18, 2008

Thanks, Amby72. I tried what you suggested and deleted the host controller entry in the device manager. It reinstalls after rebooting, but still doesn't detect the camera.

I know it's not the camera because it's working on the laptop -- but I guess it might be the wire?

Re slimmed down: I think this was a "compact" windows install that might have left out drivers etc -- but I assume it would ask if anything is missing.

Is there any other software tweak I could try before replacing the wire?
posted by muckster at 9:01 AM on April 18, 2008

On a perfectly functioning iMac, the computer simply won't recognize a FW400 camera if my LaCie external hard drive is plugged into the FW800. Do you have other occupied FW ports?
posted by themadjuggler at 9:04 AM on April 18, 2008

Were you running this slimmed down windows before the reinstall? If not, then that is the most likely culprit. Either you are missing the right driver and it's using something else (therefore not prompting you because it did find *something* to use, even if it's generic.) or possibly a service that is requires has been disabled.
posted by utsutsu at 9:11 AM on April 18, 2008