Acronis 7.0 and External Firewire HDD's

I wrote earlier about an issue with my Sandisk cardreader and Acronis and since I haven't checked the driver for that, this issue might be related but I doubt it.

I have an external Western Digital Combo 120GB Combo HDD.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=44

I found a second one on eBay last week and installed it yesterday.

The install essentially chained the second drive in line behind the first.

In running Acronis and attempting to store a backup onto the second HDD, it appears to be "processing" for about 10 minutes and then the first drive in the chain seems to go to sleep. By that I mean that the lights on the front of the unit go dark. An error pops up saying that I've disconnected the device and all data is lost. Obviously no data is affected but it sure seems to think I pulled the plug on something. Now in a previous post I mentioned that I DO have to disconnect my Sandisk card reader to avoid a BSOD but I'm not sure how that would be related to this.

Regardless, I've reversed the order of the two drives and I get the same result in an attempt to save to the second drive.

I can set each drive up as an individual drive...ie...taking the second drive out of the chain entirely...and successfully make backups to each so it seems to be drive independent.

It's possible I've goofed the IEEE 1394 setup but that seemed pretty straightforward. I've contacted Western Digital to double check.

Anyone out there successfully running chained Firewire devices like this or spotted a gap in my logic ? I'm currently searching for some "energy star" power saving toggle on the externals that might be messing me up.

Hopefully I'm doing something wrong that's simple to fix.


Windows 2000
384 MB RAM
Aconis 7.0 (patched as of early May)

 

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