Help with Magma install, please!

[Mikem]

Hey all,

I'm doing a system upgrade, and I just picked up an Avid 7-slot chassis at the same time. I put the PCI card in, and it shows up as \"Unknown Device\" with a question mark in the Device Manager.

Did I maybe put the wrong card into the PC? I put the one that said \"Host adapter\" on it, I think. I haven't tried connecting it to the chassis yet.

I was under the impression I didn't need drivers, so maybe I have the wrong card in, or maybe it won't recognize until it's connected to the chassis.

Help!

Thanks,

Mike

 

[Mikem]

OK, so the unknown device went away--it must have been something else. The PCI-to-PCI bridge didn't show up until I had connected and powered on the Magma chassis and rebooted the PC. It then installed the UAD-1's. I ended up with two cards sharing an IRQ and one card on an IRQ by itself, so it looks good. I put the UAD-1's in every other slot.

I figured I'd post my own response, for any future forum searchers.

 

[PaulB]

... until I had connected and powered on the Magma chassis and rebooted the PC.

Yes, the Magma has to run first before you turn on the PC.

Greets
Paul

 

[Mikem]

Hmm, I've just learned (sort of the hard way) that my machine won't boot without the magma turned on now. My BIOS just stalls and can't see my RAID drives, unless the magma is powered on and connected. That kinda sucks. Is there a way to avoid this? Is that typical behavior? If I disabled the PCI bridge in the device manager before rebooting, would it affect the BIOS boot up? I'm guessing no.

Anyway, I didn't want to have to leave my UAD-1's running all the time when I'm not doing music stuff. Now I may not have a choice (without uninstalling the host adapter, of course).

 

[Mikem]

Can someone please respond to my last post.

 

[Guest]

I had the same thing. For me it turned out that the cable was busted!!! Expensive joke that is... :evil:
If you have a second cable, try that 1 and see what happens.

Good luck!

 

[Mikem]

So a bad cable may cause my machine to not boot unless the magma is turned on, but works fine so long as the magma is on during boot up?

 

[Guest]

Sorry Mike, misread your post. Your machine is ONLY booting with the Magma turned on!
In my situation, my PC wouldn't boot with the Magma on.
In your case, i don't know what may cause your problem :?

 

[Mikem]

Yeah, mine just hangs when it's looking for hard drives if the magma isn't turned on. Really weird.

 

[flynn]

The Magma has to be turned on, for the computer to boot. Nothing special just for your setup.

I haven't tried disable the PCI-PCI in the device manager and store different hardware profiles, but in theory it should work :roll: :?: . Maybe experiment with different user accounts with different hardware profiles?

I mostly use my setup for music, so I dont mind to turn the Magma on.

EF

 

[Mikem]

Cool, thanks for confirming this behavior.

 

[secretworld]

Maybe you can turn the magma off when the computer has booted.
Try at your own risk!
You could also ask magma themselves.

I had a similar problem with 2 computers networked through firewire. If one wasn´t on the other wouldn´t boot (same symptom as you). (the other way round worked). In the end I fixed it by using a 4 pin firewire cable with an adapter to 6 pin wich strips the power from the cable. Ok it´s net very helpful but might give a clue to what is happening. Could be that the host card is waiting for an answer from the chassis. So you could also try disconnecting the cable before booting. (wich might in the long run damage your cable).
Good luck
Vincent

 

[Mikem]

Actually, I think I had the problem when the cable was connected or disconnected so long as the magma power was off, if memory serves.

 

[Guest]

Can someone please respond to my last post.

If you've got a PCI host card in your motherboard without the chassis powered up, you will have problems. Also, with a 7 slot Magma, you should be able to get three devices that share the same driver on a single IRQ (at least with an older version with the flat 80 pin ribbon cable). I would think that the newer ones that use the round cable should have this ability too. I'm not sure which slots you would use to interface the cards my advice would be to interface the host card with a mobo slot that dowesn't share IRQ's with any other device, if possible.

 

[Mikem]

Yeah, I'm getting a new UAD-1 in a few days, so I'll try to find the magic slot that shares with the other two UAD-1's that are sharing an IRQ between them.

 

[DrBob1970]

Hi. I have a magma chassis 13 slots, with 3 UAD and 1 PoCo in it. I can perfectly well boot up my PC without the chassis being powered, never had any problem. Actually, I have a dual-boot system, the 1st is an internet/office partition, in which I never use my music stuff, so I never turn on the chassis when I boot in this partition.
Cheers