Hard Drive Backup and Formatting

When I have installed a second drive it required me to flip a few dip switches to make it a 2nd drive. You may need to do that for your system to use it as a 2nd drive.

Unfortunately I know nothing of the Yamaha, but I bet you are right that it is a formatting problem. The dip switches mentioned by Guest, or jumper settings, do NOT normally have to be changed for the USB enclosures.

Have you tried the Disk Utility on the Mac (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility), at least to see if it can tell you what method of formatting is used?

My fear is that the PC may have considered it a blank disk and installed a blank directory on it... To check that, put it back in the Yamaha and see if it still works there! Have you tried contacting Yamaha?

Do you have a type number of the drive? try to google the issue, or is it possible to contact Yamaha?

Visit the web site of the drive manufacturer, some of them will let you download software to check & format a new drive.

RVZ,

On the Windows machine you plugged the drive into, you need to look in Disk Management to see if the drive is showing up there. Sometimes, external drives will not show up in Windows Explorer until you go to the Disk Management console and assign it an available drive letter. I've had this happen on USB flash drives. To get to Disk Management (on XP anyway), right click on "My Computer", select "Manage", then under "Storage" you will see "Disk Management". The drive will show up the list as shown below, but it will not have a letter assigned. Right click on the drive information, and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths". You will probably need to be logged in as an Administrator to do this. It is still possible the drive is formatted as something Windows will not recognize. Disk Management will tell you how Windows thinks it's formatted, if at all. If you can find someone with a Linux system, it would be worth it to see if that might recognize it. It would be pretty easy to boot a Linux LiveCD to see you have any luck there. Let us know how it goes.

Tom

the above advice is excellent and on track also some thing else to consider is there may be some sort of propitiatory software for the boot sequence designed to work only with the unit it was installed in, again contact the maker and find that out, if so it may only work in the unit it was designed/programed for.

The "Recording Unit" could use its own file system to write to the HD. You can try HD imaging software to try make a raw copy.

A quick Google search: http://www.socialentropy.com/aw4416/

Thank you all. I'll be working with it over the weekend. I'll update you when i have that moment of eureka!

Question is why don't you transfer the files to Solid State Drive vis USB on the yamaha.

Your HD should be a 2.5-inch, 12.7GB IBM Travelstar drive.

The SCSI-2 interface should work with MO drives of 128 MB, 230 MB, 540 MB, 640 MB and 1.3 GB, hard disk drives and CD-RW drives. The CD-RW drive can be used to back up the hard drive, burn final masters in a disc or track-at-once mode, or import/export audio files and play your CDs. You can't directly record or playback audio signals in real time to/from external SCSI drives, which can only be used to store sessions or audio. To record, play or edit sessions, they must be on the main drive.

The AW4416 also includes an input/output and routing matrix with storable settings. Once you establish a favorite way of working, you can use these settings as a starting point for each project. In addition to the 16 tracks of HD, there's space on the drive for a separate stereo master. That means you can mix your project digitally right back to the drive, without the need for an outboard mastering machine. Hate setting up a recording session? The AW4416's Quick Rec button asks a few basic questions and can have you recording on all 16 tracks in seconds. Each of the 16 tracks has eight virtual tracks.

The problem with backing up with CD, optical, (possibly tape if I can locate some 8mm 5/10GB tape backups), is Each one of my recording is well over 1GB, in some cases closer to 2GB. I record Live shows from various bands, and generate live albums, I have a method (via another computer interface) to get the separate 16 tracks into the computer which seems to work well (better than the .CFS to .WAV conversion anyway). Yesterday I went and picked up a couple more 40GB 2.5" IDE internal HD's to use which is nice, but I still haven't been able to backup properly, because of the large file sizes, and the temperamental CD burner. I can fill a 20GB drive in one weekend.

My goal is to have a 1TB+ External USB drive that I can have hooked to the dedicated music computer to dump the massive .CFS backup files onto right from the internal hard drive Via the drive dock into the computer. Unfortunately to do this I'll need to either invest in a SCSI/USB external, or figure out how to make the USB docking case work.

I was able to snag a few (nearly antique) small business server backup drives from work. I have 2 8mm tape drives, and a 2.3GB optical drive. Unfortunately they do me no good without the cartridges.

I'm tired and rambling now...... been a long week.

Hope you all have a brilliant weekend!

I'd suggest this scenario because of expense and you gain little with a interface to software link in a computer workstation.

I use Adobe Audition and prefer MOTU interface. You should be recording in a loss-less format .wma type for greater compression and scalability.