I'm kind of resurrecting an old topic that I posted several weeks ago. In one sense I partially resolved it but now I want to have a more permanent resolution.

To make a long story short I have a new Dell Precision workstation laptop that has a Thunderbolt 3 port. I want to connect a Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56 FireWire interface to it. I now know that the device is working well because I purchased a FireWire card and have it connected to my desktop and it's working fine. I followed instructions from focusrite support who said I could use an Apple FireWire to Thunderbolt 2 adapter and then a Thunderbolt 2 adapter to a Thunderbolt 3 and connect the Saffire to my new laptop.

My laptop sees the adaptors, but not the Saffire. The apparent problem is there's no firewire driver anywhere in my Windows 10 Pro.

So my long-winded question is this, will there be any problem in my downloading the Firewire Legacy driver from Microsoft, manually installing it and then seeing whether that will connect Sapphire device? Can anyone think of any potential problems that could result before I do this. Thanks for the help.

I don't see that your other post has ever been resolved???
I just went through a long thread on the tenforums about the "legacy" firewire driver.  As it turns out sometime back in the Win 8/8.1 era Microsoft did away with the different versions and now there is only "one" Firewire driver.  Its not called "legacy" and I can't find anything that says what the current driver is.  Another issue, all drivers now have a 2006 date, but many Versions so having a 2006 date driver means nothing.  
 
You can read the entire thread and my frustration with it all.
https://www.tenforums.com...4-firewire-driver.html
 

A little bit attention.
We used for a few weeks temporarily a DELL with firewire to digitize (commercial) vinyl. We had a lot of problems, because the recording had sometimes "holes". There are holes in the recording where 800 ms are sometimes lost. We read in german forums that some peoples had similar problems - specially with DELL, firewire and audio (not SONAR).
Then we changed the computer back to a very simple computer (only for digitizing) and we had no problems anymore. (RME Firewire 800).
I will say that firewire is out of date. Microsoft takes no more care of firewire connection and drivers. Firewire is no longer supported. Especially if you use adapter then take care.
Misteriously the problems increase by DELL laptops + firewire.
 
 

When I said that the problem was partially resolved, I meant that I can use the Saffire 56 with the desktop, so I am able to use the device, I'm just not able to use it with the Mobile Workstation.  Ideally, I would like to use it on both, but I can, and am, working around it by using it only on the desktop.   The Mobile Workstation is much more powerful, so using it for mixing would be preferable over the desktop.  The desktop is find for tracking.  I'm just trying to resolve once and for all whether I will ever get to use the 56 on the laptop.  

I'm currently using a Focusrite Pro 40 (firewire) in windows 10 with no driver issues. I'm not using it through Thunderbolt. However, the Pro 40 is still sold and is now advertised as firewire and thunderbolt. From what I understand you can use a firewire device through thunderbolt, but not vice-versa. So I think then the Safire would become a thunderbolt device and therefore would not need a firewire driver? I'm not sure about this, but I would imagine windows may not detect it as firewire if it's coming through a Thunderbolt port. In this case, assuming a firewire driver is actually required, you would have to install one manually.
 
Most firewire devices I have had over the years for audio and video have been pretty fussy about the firewire interface. They have required a Texas Instruments compliant firewire card. I'm slightly confused how that translates to Thunderbolt.
 
Have you actually spoken directly to Focusrite support about this?

Here is his other post on this that was never resolved.  Jim Roseberry our resident DAW hardware GURU tried to help.
From that post, I have to assume its not possible to do what he is trying to do, or at least not with the adapters he has.
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com...ngwriter-m3644070.aspx

At least for me, I've never had dependable/successful converting most different ports to Firewire audio device interface....

At least for me, I've never had dependable/successful converting most different ports to Firewire audio device interface....

In reality it may not work even though Focusrite support said it should. I just wonder if it is worth a try to manually install the Firewire driver. If I do it and it works, great, but could it destabilize things if it doesn't work, even if I Uninstaller it.

I'm not sure if there is a Thunderbolt driver in the laptop, at least I didn't see one, but if I understand it correctly the Saffire is looking for a Firewire driver, not a Thunderbolt. But as I have said many times, this is beyond my computer knowledge.

The Thunderbolt (Tbolt) hardware is essentially the function of a PCIe lane. Therefore, if you had a conventional PCIe firewire card, you'd not expect to see any PCIe 'drivers' in the path to the audio interface.  Equally, even though you're daisy chaining TBolt3-Tbolt2-Firewire, the Tbolt portion of that path is essentially invisible. 
 
I think it's a quick and low-risk experiment to see if the LS56 firewire drivers will work okay for you. I have personally successfully used a Liquid Saffire 56 in Win10 via a motherboard-based firewire chipset; on an *old* DP35DP Intel board with a Q6600 Core 2 Quad. It's my administrative machine.