I have been getting a number of calls from clients asking what to do when they get this message…
Quite often it comes up when they have moved a session on a drive from one system to another, its fine on system one but this message comes up on system 2.
So what to do?
Go into the Workspace window which you find in the Window menu of Pro Tools and when it opens it will look something like this…
We are interested in the letters in the A (audio) and V (video) columns. The letters set the status of the drive.
Any drive that isn’t formatted correctly will be set to T (Transfer) drive as these drives can only be used to transfer sessions from one system to another. They cannot be used to host active Pro tools sessions. However it is my experience that these settings can ‘change’ on drives that can support Pro Tools sessions, so it is useful to know how to reset them.
You will notice from this screen shot that ‘Work Disk 2′ is set to T which is what caused the error message above.
Assuming the drive is correctly formatted, to reset it back to normal, click on the T and a little menu will appear.
Change it to R if you want to be able to Record onto this drive or if you want to prevent recording onto the drive you could set it to P so you can Playback a session from this drive.
Now that Work Disk 2 is set to R, the session will open and all will be fine.
Another way to solve this, especially if a drive repeatedly goes back to T or P on one system but is fine on another is to delete the Volumes folder in Unicode – Databases – Digidesign – Application Support – Library on the start up drive of the system that won’t play ball. Be careful though, not to delete the Catalogs folders though as this is where any catalogs you might have created are stored.
Once you have put the Volumes folder in the bin and emptied it, restart the computer and when you relaunch Pro Tools it will create a new Volumes folder.
You could of course use the excellent Pro Tools Prefs and Database Helper application to do this for you, just select the Volumes button from the options..
Mike is Pro Tools genius and an award winning ‘audiomeister’, defined as ‘a person of great skill and authority in sound’. His vast array of credits include music (from classical to rock), drama and documentaries across all the BBC Radio networks, as well as audio post production for video and TV, ‘new media’, live sound, commercial CDs, DVDs and podcasts, helping clients tell their stories with sound. He has been described as "an oasis of calm in a stormy creative world"; "quick, creative & easy to work with"; "always going the extra mile"; and "invests himself in the success of your project"’.show me less content in the footer
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July 5, 2011 at 9:23 am
Had the same problem, great help, thanks.