Tekram TR-1394W Installation Problems

Hey guys,

I recently purchased this card, as my PC does not already have Firewire:

http://www.computerhq.com/Tekram_TR-1394W_...-id-474563.html

It was however, OEM, and did not come packaged with any drivers. The Tekram website is notoriously useless as their US site is incomplete and the Taiwanese/Chinese sites seem to provide blank pages when I click to see the product drivers.

Basically, it's not being recognised by Windows and I can't get any external drivers to make Windows recognise it.

My PC is Windows XP Home, AMD Athlon 2400XP+ so there shouldn't be any major incompatibility issues.

Apparently, the card is Plug and Play so XP should just recognise automatically upon start-up, but no, nothing.

I definitely installed the card correctly as when I plug a device into it, the device receives power but doesn't get recognised by Windows.

Does anyone know what the problem could be?

 

Are you sure that the device itself is being recognized properly? It might not be the firewire card. Go to the device manager and see if you can see the firewire controller listed somewhere.

 

Unfortunately I've already checked this and the firewire controller is not listed.

 

Try in some other computer if possible~!

 

Have you tried the Add Hardware wizard and selected the device manually?

 

I can't, I don't have access to another PC.

Yes. It searches for new hardware, finds nothing. It then asks me whether I've connected the hardware. I click yes. It tells me to find the device in a list of already installed devices. It's not there. I choose "Add a new hardware device". Then I let it search for new hardware again. It finds nothing. It asks me to select the specific hardware model from a list. I choose "1394 bus host controllers", and it finally tells me that it couldn't find any drivers for this device.

 

Try a different PCI slot~!

 

Oh no! It's based on a VIA Chipset :swt:

Okay... this is not going to be pretty. Expansion card based on VIA chipsets are notoriously difficult to configure.

I just went fishing for a driver for you. There are none. This is an excert from VIA themselves.

 

I'd try it in a different PCI slot. It's quite possible that you're running into a conflict where the PCI slot your firewire card is in shares an IRQ with another device on the motherboard. Depending on your motherboard and the device in use, you may be able to turn the device off. However, it's just as easy to relocate the device.

 

The card was faulty.

The drivers do install automatically on XP and 98SE onwards upon startup after fitting the card.

Thanks for all your help.

 

As shown here, my war against VIA is not dumb-founded!