Hi Daniel..., I I installed the latest driver, version 3.069. Also, the firmware is up to date. That process went without a problem. As soon as the dialog box opened up to remind me i'd need to restart the computer for the changes to take effect, the computer already froze and hanged like that forever, just before it could exit windows and restart.

The first time i restarted, I had the FF800 on during reboot. As soon as I entered windows, when windows was loading the pictograms of my desktop, the computer froze right away. Needed to manually restart.

Tried it a couple of times, but this will invariably lead to a computer freeze.

BTW, if you mean what happens when my ff is turned on with the computer turned off - the answer to that is... it turns on with the leds dancing normally, then the host error light remains on (and the +4dbu in/out LEDs aswell).

I have done this. I have tried every possible one of these:

OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller
OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller (legacy)
OHCI-compliant Texas Instruments 1394-Host controller

to get the ff800 running. No success.
Also, I have disabled everything on my computer I could to make sure IRQ is interfering as little as possible. No success. Same in BIOS. I tried switching the dawicontrol pcie card to another pci x1 slot, no success. I bought a good firewire cable (1.8 meters), no success. I changed the firewire port to which my fireface is connected (as in, the second fw400 port on the dawicontrol fw card), no success.

I was busy with this till 5 in the morning and now all day. Nothing is helping till now and perhaps i have restarted 100 times already. Very sad.

I will try to test the FF in another computer in 30 minutes. The unit was bought from a musician who used it to record his EP with (I also bought some good overhead mics but can't even begin to use them now that I'm having problems with the ff800 already). I think it is safe to assume it is working and even garantueed it is and I could come back if I had problems. But I don't want to! I want to use the unit and make love with it.

Thanks for jumping in. Need all the help I can have from you guys here.
To answer: 1)
I don't have third party firewire drivers. Nothing to uninstall there.
2) Currently I am using the legacy driver.
3) I just bought a fresh new good firewire cable today and am using it. kept the distance short (only 1.8M) to avoid any trouble on that side.

The fireface 800 even works on the VIA firewire chip that's featured on my brother's computer MSI-P55-GD65 motherboard. Just so you know.

I see that there is a jmicron chip on my own motherboard. How do I turn it off? Maybe it is interfering with the firewire connection?

Thanks for being here Daniel. Ehrm, no there is no jMicron fw connection. I wanted to say that I see something about jMicron when i start up my computer, something about it governing the sata/ide raid connection or whatever, but i thought you might know how to turn such a thing off, in case it is interfering with my setup... but that is really just a desperate measure and not intelligently argumented. Just so you understand: My FF is really connected on the dawicontrol, in the device manager, when clicking on the fireface 800 i can see that it is 'connected on OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller (legacy)'. so it is definetely communicating with the dawicontrol, as it is the only fw connection available on my computer. I don't have anything other.

I don't know what to do and I am stuck after having invested my savings into the fireface.

Hey Vinark,
Thanks for chiming in. In post #10 you will see that I installed the fireface correctly on my brothers system, using exactly the same dawicontrol firewire card. I am now working on this for 24 hours in total, and I don't know what the problem is. I hope RME can suggest a sort of troubleshoot list of points users typically miss, ... I am running low on options. It all works on my brothers computer, so why not on mine? ...

Is your machine a dedicated DAW or does it server other purposes as well?
Any chance to kick out or unplug what's not absolutely crucial?
You might want to check if there's a BIOS update available.
Did you perform a memory check? (faulty RAM)
Try updating FF driver again and then the firmware...

Good luck anyway!
Erbs
(Proud FF800 owner since the early pleistocene
and still loving it)

When i look at the the current processes running inside of my task manager, I see that fireface.exe and firefacemix.exe have the *32 suffix behind them, so they appear as "fireface.exe*32" and "firefacemix.exe*32". Is this normal in a windows 7 64bit environment? Shouldn't they be 64 bit? Just a desperate attempt to understand my problem...

Visit rme-audio.de/tv, download Teamviewer and mail me access data (don't post here...rotfl). I can't promise I'll find a solution, but I can have a look around....

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Ok. Yesterday evening, RME Support specialist Daniel Fuchs took over my computer to take a look around in my computer. I should thank him here publically and thank RME for talking the talk and walking the walk on customer support. This is what I think about when I hear 'support', but sadly, the lionshare of the firms out there only pay lip service to such terms.

Although the steps sounded hopeful, unfortunately, the problem could not be solved. It remains a mystery why my system is crashing everytime I turn on the Fireface 800.

We did decide that I would try a couple of things more. Daniel, below is the result of what happened when I tried the different things we discussed. I post them here so that others can use these (and the above) suggestions to their benefit.

1) Play around with Power savings settings inside of BIOS, with the aim of not saving any power. Result: The only option here was to disable the ACPI, but that, as expected, caused a bootloop since my OS is installed on grounds of ACPI principle.

2) Swap my nVidia VGA card with my brothers ATI based VGA card (on who's system the ff800 did work), with the aim of bypassing my nVidia based graphics card, as it sometimes causes difficulties in tandem with the FF800. Result: The ATI VGA card required to be fed with power, but my PSU doesn't have such a graphic card power output. Instead I decided to just disable and uninstall my nVidia card inside of device manager, and try to fire up thr ff800. This had the benefit of not introducing more unnecessary IO (like my brothers VGA card) and removing active drivers in the system. This would make the system revert to the basic windows vga driver. This didn't work.

3) Disable the TSSTCorp optical drives, as they sometimes could cause errors in tandem with FF. I already did this. Didn't work.

4) Check my memory for errors. I used the windows memory diagnostic tool to perform a memory test. It didn't find any errors. For the record, I launched this by clicking the windows icon, and in the search bar entered "mdsched.exe", without quotation marks.

Are there any other things I could try?

Goodmorning , Daniel. Ehm, yeah I'm losing hope here as well.

Something interesting happened. Just to be sure my vga card wasn't the culprit, i again disabled and uninstalled it from my device manager. I then rebooted my computer, and after the desktop was loaded, windows began to find my nvidia drivers and tried to install them. Before this was all done, i turned on my fireface 800 and -- no hang...?. I started a mp3, however, I did get that reptetive Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr/jitter/click/pop-however-you-want-to-call-it-shit-sound. But, the computer did not hang! I turned off the ff800 and then, boom it still froze up my computer.... . Strange.  When i restarted the pc, and tried to turn on the firefa e, the red host error light kept on considerably longer than it should.

Another thing: Is there a way to manually assign an IRQ to the ff800? I know about the procedure (described here: http://www.ehow.com/how_7707636_assign- … river.html ) but, can i do it from within the driver files? I know i have irq channels 3 and 4 open, since they are for my COMports, which i disabled. I could assign one of those numbers to the ff800 perhaps? Or do you think this is a stupid and easy way to mess things up beyond repair. Something i don't aspire to do.

thanks for the IRQ suggestion. I won't bother messing with that.

I rather not spend my funds on such a card because I'm having a hard time convincing myself that this will do anything for the good. I mean, I already totally disabled the graphics card by disabling and uninstalling it. I'm thinking about buying a different motherboard.
Asus P5K-E/WiFi-ap as I'm not seeing people with a lot of trouble on the p35 chipset (775 socket) whereas a couple of people had big problems on the p965 chipset. What would you think about such a mobo..? Do or die basically. It does hava a agere 1394 chipset, but i could just use my own firewire card by dawicontrol and bypass it. Or is it better to just get a mobo witouth agere chipset altogether?

Hey Erbs, thanks for showing up. I've tried Speccy and although it provides some nice information, it doesn't provide a lot of relevant information in my situation. But I will keep it for future use. Thanks for the tip. System processes are stable at the time of the freeze.

I'm thinking: is it necessary for my memory or pcie to get a certain amount of voltage to work properly for the fw card? I read somewhere that something like 1.95 voltage should be fed to the fw connection on TI chip for it work properly? Or is this an internet myth? My computer froze, so i cant find it back.

Hi,
The P965 was a very buggy chipset. How much actual physical ram do you have in the system? The boards only supported a max of 8 gigs and had allot of CPU, Memory and chipset compatibility issues. I would not use more than 4 gigs of ram in that system while you are testing . The ram should exactly the same make and model. not a mix of different brand  and sizes.
Thanks Chris

Ok. I tried out different memory combinations. I had 2x2048@800mhz and 2x512mb@800mhz installed, both by corsair. As i tried to boot the computer with the 2x512mb set, my screen froze up, and glitches where visible in the start up screen (you know, with the energy star logo and all). So, that set is out of the computer for good as it isn't allowing me past the boot fase, whatever I do. Thanks! I am left with 4gb@ 800mhz... . Fireface will still crash the system and hang it. So I'm losing. The only difference is it takes longer before it crashes. Also, if I turn the unit on only when my desktop is fully loaded, it could take up as long as 5 minutes before the crash. If the unit is on during startup already, the system will crash before my desktop is even loaded. I don't know what this means. This whole dream is turning out to be one of the nastiest nightmares I ever had. I am very upset. Very, very, very upset.

And if you do exchange to mobo, please do a clean install of Win7, just to be sure.
Or if you havn´t tried that yet, do a clean install now.

I believe such a compatibility list of whatever nature would be a bit pointless, considering product lifespans in the mainboard etc. markets. Your specific board is many generations old, and who knows, ith might work elswhere with a different Firewire and/or VGA card.
The list of tested systems for the UC was part of a semi-public beta test and not so much intended to determine compatibility with indiviual systems as rather a way of finding out what we should declare to be the minimum system requirements for our own USB implementation, which was new at the time.

Hope the Asus will work. Some ASUS boards have non-working varieties of LSI/Agere FW onboard, so better stick with the Dawi card.

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

All these hassles are the reason why professional audio PC builders exist and why so many audio users opt to get Apple hardware. The former will make sure that its system uses components that should work, the latter is used (and thus tested) by thousands of other users with exact the same specifications. Everything else is a lottery, especially if you are trying to build/debug these things yourself (instead of getting a professional to do it for you).

No one can tell you if the new mainboard will work better, no one can even tell you if your other components are fault free and thus won't just cause the same issues with the new mainboard (PSU and RAM still come to mind).

What you could do it stress test your current system without the Fireface being connected to get an idea about CPU, RAM, mainboard and PSU being possible culprits. Run something like Prime95 and Memtest86(+) for several hours to a day and see how your system behaves. And if you are serious about your audio computer stuff then get another Firewire card, preferably with a different chipset (1394_B_) and see how this changes the matter. Personally I would also exchange the PSU to see what happens when everything else fails.

Last but not least take a _very_ close look at the condensers of your mainboard. Does any of them bulge on its top side (where there usually is a cross-like engraving that is meant to break in case of too much pressure)?!

I have gotten the motherboard. I have yet to install it, and that is what I'm going to do after this post. But I thought it'd be interesting for RME (and posterity) to post here that as a last resort to try to still get my current system running with the FF800, I tried a fresh install of the win7x64sp1 with all updates and install NOTHING else, except for the ff800 drivers. No VGA, no wireless, no nothing. Ofcourse, everything is disabled, power settings appropriately set and all. I still get the damn freezes and crashes. Interesting is that upon first launch of the ff800, I got the following errors': (Can't post the screenshots here, so:)

"The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?

Name: C:\Windows\System32\fireface.exe
Publisher: Unknown Publisher [bold in original]
Type: Application
From: C:\Windows\System32\fireface.exe"

And at the bottom "This file does not have a valid digital signature that verifies its publisher. You should only run software from publishers you trust."

The same happens with firefacemix.exe.

It is to be noted that although i did not get this security warning (and after clicking it I now don't anymore as well), now the crash happened EXACTLY on the same moment this pops up. Perhaps coincidence, perhaps not. Maybe you want to look into that.

Also, now the ff800 still emits a terrible sound out of its PHONES jack, the system does not hang. It still hangs upon switching the unit off and upon trying to do restart/shut off the system.

I'll now go ahead and install the new motherboard, very anxious about it... I'll be back after I once more formatted my harddrives and installed a clean win7 on it (switching from p965 to p35 chipset, so complete format is advised).