Firewire not working after win 7 upgrade

[PaulC]

I recently upgraded to win 7 home premium 64 bit from vista 32 bit. My computer is a dell xps 420. Since the upgrade I cannot upload video from my hdr-hc3 mini dv camcorder using the firewire port. I checked that the driver was the legacy driver but this did not fix the problem. I bought a new firewire card and this also did not fix the problem. I used the driver that came with the card and also the drivers in win 7 and nothing worked. I have about 40 tapes I'd like to upload. Any help would be appreciated or any suggestions for an alternative way to upload the tapes.

[Steve Grisetti]

First, download WinDV from http://windv.mourek.cz/ and see if you can use it to connect to your camcorder and capture yoru video. You don't say which program you plan to edit with, but DV-AVI video captured by WinDV will edit in ANY PC-based video program.

If you just can't get the driver to work at all, it could be that, in upgrading from Vista 32 to Win 7 64, you're using the wrong driver. Open your Device Manager, locate the IEEE-1394 and uninstall the driver completely. Then either select Scan for New Devices from the Device Manager menu or plug your camcorder into your FireWire port so that Windows sees it installs a new driver.

BTW, when you open the Device Manager, your IEEE-1394 doesn't show with a yellow exclamation point, right? Does it show at all when you have your camcorder plugged into it?

[PaulC]

I'll download win/dv and try it. To answer your questions, IEEE-1394 doesn't show with a yellow exclamation point. When the camcorder is plugged in the camcorder doesn't show. I uninstalled the driver for the new firewire card and restarted the computer and windows installed a Texas instrument driver.

[PaulC]

Hi Steve, I tried all your suggestions and none worked. I tried a different cable and still no luck. As Sherlock Holmes once said, when you eliminate everything else, whatever is left is the problem. I had uploaded a tape just before I upgraded to win 7 and I also checked all the settings on the camcorder to make sure nothing had changed. But the camcorder was the only thing left!!! I borrowed an old Panasonic dv camcorder with a hdmi connection and it worked just fine. I uploaded one hour of video with windv with no problems. So now I need to figure out if the sony is damaged or if I missed a setting somewhere. Thanks for your help and sorry for what turned out to be a waste of your time.

[Steve Grisetti]

Great detective work, Paul! Glad you could figure out where the problem lay.

Though sorry your camcorder is malfunctioning.