Anycast and hard drive problem

[Frederick]

I have read the posts about the Anycast with interest, I have just got one in my department for recording research projects. I attached a NTFS firewire drive but it came up unformatted. I formated it with the Anycast File Manager / format comands and the drive appeared to record video through the I link, but now my computer will not see the drive. Is there any way I can get the PC to see the drive or reformat it back?

thanks

Fred

[paulears]

You have come accross just one of the serious (and unsorted) problems. I've had one for over a year, and got shot of it last week - thank God. An unfinished product.

 

The snag you have is that you have not grasped the daft way they do it. Anycast formats the drive in linux ext3 format - so you probably are recording to the drive - although you need to make sure you are running the latest update to make the sound work, or it forgets to record audio. Once the files are on the drive, you can read them if you search the net for linux drivers - they work ok, actually and you will be able to mount the drive on your pc and read the files - what you can't do is write them. So you can take the files off the anycast and use them in a pc editor. You cannot then put them back. The file system is very odd - the data is in one folder, and housekeeping data in the other. Even if you resave the edited file with an identical filename, anycast recognises the file is not one of it's own and refuses to play it - worse, if, like me you try other things to make this happen, all of a sudden there will be a nasty noise from the drive and it kills itself. The anycast and the pc won't then read it, and you cannot reformat it. This I reported to Sony and guess what - they said it was being referred to japan, and that was the last contact I had. Simply terrible design. When they get it finished it will be good. The last role I used it for was probably the most expensive analogue to dv convertor in the world.

 

hope this helps

Paul

[Frederick]

You have come accross just one of the serious (and unsorted) problems. I've had one for over a year, and got shot of it last week - thank God. An unfinished product.

Paul,

Thanks for your answer, I will try the Linux drivers on an old PC, and see what is on the drive. I don't want to risk my Matrox RTX 100 editing PC.

I have been recording to a Firestore successfully, so I may stick to that for the time being.

regards

Fred

 

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