Obscure, geeky question about Edirol FA-66 win 7 64-bit drivers

[SecretSam]

I have an old but generally rock solid Edirol FA-66 firewire 400 audio/MIDI interface that I bought to use with a Mac laptop. I recently got a giant-sized i7 windows 7 laptop (17" screen, 8GB RAM and about 1TB of drives), and would like to use the FA-66 with that as well.

There is only one version of the win 7 64-bit driver available from Edirol: version 1.00. I have tried to install this a few times, but the installer hangs at the point where it is supposed to detect the FA-66 device. I have tried the fixes that have been recommended around the interweb, including using a legacy version of the PC's firewire controller driver, and trying the Vista version of the FA-66 driver with the installer running in compatibility mode. Neither has worked. I have also tried several different points at which to switch the FA-66 on (when told to by the installer; before system restart; after system restart but before the installer asks for it). I have also tried switching the PC's firewire controller off in Device Manager, and then switching it on when the installer asks for the FA-66 to be connected.

The Edirol UK support email page is offline.

Sooooo ....

Does anyone know of a fix for this, or does anyone know what files the installer puts in what folders, so I could try to put these in place manually ?

Dunno if this is relevant, but the windows machine has a 4-pin firewire socket, so the unit has to be powered from a power supply.

The FA-66 driver readme file says:

"In order to use this product with the 64-bit Edition of Windows 7, please read and understand the following points. You must also take into account the compatibility of each product you will be using.
•In order to use the 64-bit Edition of Windows 7, you must use 64-bit drivers; not only for this product, but also for all hardware you're using with your computer.
•This driver has been tested on several computer systems, but please understand that we cannot guarantee it will operate on your particular computer."

That is as cheeky a get-out-of-jail-free card as I have ever seen.

[SecretSam]

OK, this is to record my findings for anyone else who faces this problem. It is not good news.

The problem does not lie with Edirol, it lies with Microsoft and/or Intel. It manifests with other FW devices as well, such as video cameras.

There are two possible causes, neither of which is readily fixable for me.

1. It seems that Win 7 only detects new hardware automatically when it draws current. Because the laptop has 4-pin firewire it doesn't draw current. (Only 6 pin FW does that). I have tried using the functions to detect hardware manually in start>computer>[right click]manage. Doesn't help.

2.. The other probable cause I have found is at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/535bd86a-aa85-4ff6-9eb7-3996ea686ec4/firewire-1394-compatibility-on-windows-7?forum=w7itprohardware

The poster says:

"PROBLEM SOLVED - WINDOWS 7 DOESN'T RECOGNIZE IEEE 1394 / FIREWIRE DV DEVICES

Strange as it sounds, having tried the legacy driver solution and everything else proposed here and elsewhere, I fixed this issue on my machine by editing the relevant PNF files in the Windows\INF directory to point to C:\Windows instead of D:\Windows. Don't know why the path was wrong, but it was, and editing it allowed my Sony GV-D800 DV firewire editing deck to install and work no problem. Files are hard to read because precompiled; Find function in Wordpad fails to find the string - search on the : (colon) to find the strings to edit. Files I edited included MSTAPE.PNF, MSDV.PNF, KS.PNF. KSCAPTUR.PNF, KSFILTER.PNF, TAPE.PNF, DIGITALMEDIADEVICE,PNF (?).

yOU CAN GET A FAIRLY COMPLETE LIST OF FILES YOU MAY NEED TO EDIT (IF YOUR PROBLEM IS CAUSED BY THIS FLAW) BY LOOKING AT A WORKING xp INSTALLATION OF THE DEVICE - CHECK THE DRIVER DETAILS TO SEE WHAT FILES ARE INSTALLED, AND CHECK THE CORRESPONDING pnf FILES FOR PATH ERRORS. (Sorry about the caps)

Good luck

Proposed as answer by TTY33 Sunday, June 20, 2010 10:08 PM"

I have looked inside a couple of the files that the poster lists, and they do indeed seem to have mis-typed paths. However, I do not know how to get a definitive list of affected files, and am loathe to bugger about with anything in the Windows directory without really knowing what I am doing.

Users of desktop machines can install 6-pin FW cards, but on this laptop, my only choice seems to be get a USB sound card. If anyone knows otherwise, I would be glad to hear about it !

[robinv]

Hi Sam - i have an FA-66 and i've had no trouble running it with Windows 7 or 8 on the version 1.00 drivers. However, like any firewire audio interface you need to have the right sort of firewire adapter chipset. There are a lot of chipsets out there that just dont work with audio interfaces. Ideally you need a TI Texas Instruments chipset or a VIA one. Sometimes then you need to do the legacy driver thing but i've not had to do that myself with this interface.

1. It seems that Win 7 only detects new hardware automatically when it draws current. Because the laptop has 4-pin firewire it doesn't draw current. (Only 6 pin FW does that). I have tried using the functions to detect hardware manually in start>computer>[right click]manage. Doesn't help.

This seems a bit bizarre to me as in it should have nothing to do with the drawing of power but rather it will only detect it if the interface is switched on - so on 4 pin it would need its own power supply.

The other solution seems pretty complex for this interface as i've found it very tolerant generally. I reckon the problem is simply that it's the wrong sort of firewire chipset which is the same problem people have all the time with laptops and firewire.

I hope that helps
Cheers
Robin

[SecretSam]

Thanks, Robin.

Edirol's documentation does mention that the TI chipset works, but doesn't list any others. My Windows chops are not what they were, so I can't get deep enough into the BIOS to see what make the chipset is (the manufacturer name isn't presented in Device Manager). I suspect that the FW chipset is built int the Asus motherboard, but wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.

Anyway, there isn't a suitable expansion port for adding a FireWire card, so I am stuck with the not-very-well-designed native chipset.

And there I was thinking IEEE 1394 is an industry standard ...

[Pete Kaine]

And there I was thinking IEEE 1394 is an industry standard ...

It was, then everyone decided that it would be far more cost effective to fit a cheaper solution that perhaps combine it with other I/O that stops it being prioritize CPU usage in real time (i.e. video/audio), because it's nice to have the feature on the box art, but its niche enough that if they screw it up that not enough people will complain for it to affect the bottom line.

I can't think of a single board currently that ships with a dedicated T.I. controller chip on it these days and its been heading this way for a few generations now. If your lucky, your board may have a VIA solution in its place but its still not ideal.

If you grab and run Belarc adviser from http://belarc.com/ somewhere in the vast list of info it spits out will be the make and model of the FW controller which may offer you some guidence.