Anyone's Firewire drives just stop working?

[Matt Grondin]

Hi, both my Lacie drives are no longer mounting on my desktop... I was a little freaked at first, but I plugged them into my laptop and they are fine. I tried restarting with a minmum or extensions and that didn't help. Apple tech support told me that the ports might be fried and that I'd have to replace the motherboard (yeah right) and so I bought a firewire PCI card and it worked for a little while, but they have stopped mounting again. I can only think that maybe I should reinstall my OS, but I've been avoiding that. Has anyone else had this problem? It's really annoying.

[Winey]

Been through the same thing.
I heard there was a bad batch of LaCie FW drives.
I sent mine back to LaCie only to have problems again a month after getting it back.
I don't know what the deal is.
Mine would show up as unformatted over and over again.
I have another LaCie FW drive that has worked fine so who knows.

[jdunn]

I recommend building your own Firewire drives. Get an Ice Cube 800 case from OWC or Firewire Depot and pop a nice Seagate ATA 7200 rpm drive in there. It's a little more expensive I guess, but no problems makes it well worth it to me.

[beatzz]

yikes this isn't to good.

I better start to back up on cdr's now.

First thing did you try different cables??? I know it sounds lame but you gotta ask

Second, did you turn the drives off without putting them away (dragging to the trash/ejecting etc...)

If so, all the tech support in the world won't get you back up and running. so,

DO THIS INSTEAD:
Shut down, unplug your computer's power and all firewire cables

UNplug the firewire cables from the drives themselves along with their power cables

Wait 30 mins, then plug it all up again.

May sound lame but I swear I think all the ports reset themselves and begin working again.

If this works, repair permissions using Apple disk utility, and get back to work

[alphajerk]

happened once to me, it was a hosed PS to the drive, though it powered the FW bridge, it didnt have enough to power the drive as well, so i hooked the drive to the computer power, the FW bridge to the FW case power, it mounted, i xferred the drives, took the HD out of the FW case, formatted it, and installed it in the machine.

i bought a ATA controller card to add 4x more IDE drives and put all i could fit inside the machine. i have 5x HDs and my DVD drive hooked up right now....

I've been thinking of gettin an ATA controller. Which one are you using? If I put one on my G4 will it get me around the hard drive size limit?

Right now i have 3 internals and 3 firewire drives. If I could put all of these in the computer it would be cool.

[T_R_S]

I have bad problems in Tiger with Firewire drives. I've gone back to Panther.

[jdunn]

Here's what I'm getting.

Seritek PCI SATA Contoller w/ Dual Drive Bay Bundle at OWC

Pop a couple Western Digital Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drives in there and everything should be happiness.

I just got a Dual 2.0 Power Mac, and so far it's working okay with my Ice Cube 800 Firewire drive. This SATA thing looks far superior though, and it's way simpler than SCSI too. You can run the two drives as a RAID 0 if you're working on huge projects that need additional drive power.

I had already decided I was buying this controller/drive setup before I bought the G5. With the SATA Controller and my Lynx AES16 card, I have no need for PCI-X here. Seritek does make a PCI-X version for not much more money, for those of you who do have PCI-X Macs.

[j-uk]

I friend of mine lost his entire drive and he blames the OS. Haven't had any probs myself (knock on wood...) but I always dismount the drives before shutting down cos according to a mac guy I spoke to said that was safer (& rather that then sorry) /j

[jdunn]

Yes, it's always wise to unmount your FW drive before shutting down or even restarting if possible. And just to be extra careful, I don't like dragging the drive to the trash on the desktop.

Open the finder, and use the little eject icon next to the drive in the left column. Sometimes it takes a few seconds. I think this is when the drive is idle and not being immediately addressed perhaps.

Also, I wonder if Journaling has anything to do with the problems people are having lately w/ Firewire drives in Tiger?

I don't know........ I like the simplicity of Firewire, but something about it seems USB'ish to me.

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by no ssl yet

First thing did you try different cables??? I know it sounds lame but you gotta ask

Second, did you turn the drives off without putting them away (dragging to the trash/ejecting etc...)

If so, all the tech support in the world won't get you back up and running. so,

DO THIS INSTEAD:
Shut down, unplug your computer's power and all firewire cables

UNplug the firewire cables from the drives themselves along with their power cables

Wait 30 mins, then plug it all up again.

May sound lame but I swear I think all the ports reset themselves and begin working again.

If this works, repair permissions using Apple disk utility, and get back to work

Who sez primitive superstition is dead?

[I'm not being critical here, really. I find that as frustration rises and comprehension sinks in dealing with technology that is so complex as to be unpredictable, that I find myself reverting to superstitious approaches. You know, the last time it worked, I'd just clicked the minimize icon and I was wearing my Pop Group tee shirt...]

Seriously, though, it can be hellacious sussing this stuff out, and it's tempting to succumb to the logical short-circuit of superstition... just remember, if your "superstition" always works... it ain't just superstition. But you'll never know for sure (or know why) if you just shut down your brain and repeat what you think might have worked in the past...

You can call it superstition, but I know of only 2 ways to make an osx firewire drive that wont mount work. One is the above unplug and wait.

The second is to mount the drive on an OS9 computer, then move it back to the osx computer. Diss it if you choose. (I just did this today and it worked.) THe guy who posted his problem may decide to try it before fooling with is OS for no reason. IF this works, I promise you he will be repeating this whenever his drives fail to mount

Use DiskWarrior to repair the directories. It works for me every time.

<L>

[SONGDOC]

I have an issue, only about once a month, where my lacie DVD firewire durner will not let any other firewire devices mount. Been hell to track down because either that day, or the next, there will be no issues. Once i unplug the firewire to the DVD, everything mounts right up.
Live or die by the technology..

[Matt Grondin]

Well boys, the verdict is in... both drives are now mounted on the desktop and what a beautiful site it is. I had tried the whole disconnect the cables and restart thing, and it had worked once, but the drives disappeared again. I made an interesting discovery when I unplugged one of the drives, the other one mounted. This had me stumped so I plugged the unplugged drive into my laptop, and it didn't mount there either.

Around this time I'm thinking, what the *uck! It had mounted on the laptop just fine before. So, in a last ditch effort, I tried the other port on the drive and it worked! Apparently, one of the ports on the drive is fried... thankfully they make them with two ports. Anyway, I plugged it back into my main studio computer and everything's golden. For some reason, having the one drive with the bad port hooked up caused the other perfectly fine drive not to show up, leading me to think there was a major problem. Weird... now I just have to buy an AIT backup machine so I won't have another hard drive near-freak-out again. Thanks for all the tips! Later.

[JonCraig]

Originally Posted by no ssl yet

I've been thinking of gettin an ATA controller. Which one are you using? If I put one on my G4 will it get me around the hard drive size limit?

yes. just went through this process myself. any modern ata-controller card will be able to address over 127 gigs. you might price other hd configurations while you're at it (sata, raid, etc.). you'll spend a bit more, but get great performance (if you need it).

--jon

[jdunn]

Originally Posted by no ssl yet

Right now i have 3 internals and 3 firewire drives. If I could put all of these in the computer it would be cool.

I don't know, I've heard it said that the additional heat produced by internal drives can shorten the life of your computer. It's best to keep them in external enclosures if possible.

[JonCraig]

Originally Posted by jdunn

It's best to keep them in external enclosures if possible.

i agree, but for a different reason. i'm constantly bringing fw drives to and from sessions, backing up, etc. if you make all your drives internal, you're losing portability. you also lose a bit of effectiveness when backing up. what i mean is, you've got your data on seperate drives, sure, but what if there's a fire in the studio? or if lightning strikes and hits your computer? it could take all the drives out, too.

i know these scenarios aren't likely, but it's something to think about. i have three internal drives & 2 fw (soon forced to get a 3rd fw, no doubt). i wouldn't give up the portability and security of fw anytime soon.

--jon

[jdunn]

I hear ya. Portability is crucial. Still, my G5 is pumping out quite a bit of heat, and that's with no extra internal drives. IMHO, the heat issue IS a very good reason to go with external drive enclosures.

BTW, I'm happy to report that the combo of the SeriTek PCI/SATA card with dual bay external hot-swap SATA enclosure and Western Digital Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drive is rocking. It was easy to install and works great.

The only thing I don't like is that the two SATA connectors on the PCI card are right next to the metal strip that separates PCI slots on the back of the G5 chassis. The cable connectors just barely fit in there, but they're very solidly anchored. Not going to come loose very easily.

[majool]

I've had (and am having again) same problem with my Lacie. Lost data, fried ports (on the drive). Really frustrating. I've had good success recovering my data with DataRescueX though when everything else didn't work. Gotta go do that now...yuk. I'm really starting to hate firewire.

[jdunn]

You should really check out that SATA thing like I did above. Unless of course you're on a laptop.

[Richard Wilson]

If you are using bus power for your drives - you can get a voltage mismatch as more than 12v comes from the FW port in the computer.
this could be your problem.
I would suggest using external drives with their own internal AC power supply - such as the Avastor HDX line of drives-which have a pro build spec.

[Telecastr]

One of ours starting doing the same thing a couple months back too.

[theblue1]

I'm sorry, I just have to say that everytime I see this topic in the listings I have this vision of a Day the Earth Stood Still scenario, with all the Firewire drives all around the world, suddenly stopping all at once...

Klatu niktu bariktu... er... something.

Klaatu Barada Nikto! The message of that film has not diminished yet, and its nearly as old as I am...

<L>

[theblue1]

Uh oh... something tells me I might have gotten vaporized by Gort, based on my inability to recall even the simplest alien phrases.


A great movie. I've always liked the human side of sci fi. That's why I liked, say, the Fifth Element (a story of a man's fear of committment to love and marriage, donchya see?) or Rollerball (the original, puhleez... don't even mention that horrible remake) or the Man Who Fell to Earth.


And on that note, back to the mysterious failure of Firewire devices around the world...

[retropete]

One of my Lacie drives was intermittent, and I wound up sending it back to Lacie several times. They were very reluctant to give me a new drive and kept trying to fix the old one. And I got a lot of accusatory crap, "you must have done this etc..." It must have been sent back 3 times, I think. And the fact is, I have another that's worked fine for years on the same computer. Finally they swapped it out. But it was a couple months of back and forth.

In the meantime, another started acting up. (Not the original I've had for years,) Just went out and bought another and backed it up and started using the new one instead. Put the "acting up" one in the closet. Found it sometimes worked if I switched ports, but didn't have the energy to go through the whole thing with Lacie again.

I now have one of their terabyte drives, just for recording and iTunes. Lord, if that one ever went on the fritz ...

Better back that up soon ...

P

[JonCraig]

i've had great luck w/ lacie tech support. i made the mistake of buying a 160gig porche drive (hey... it was on sale...), and it started to crap out on me about 5 months later. i called tech support, told them what was up, and they started to give me a return authorization, etc. i said, "hey... you and i both know that even if you give me another porche drive, it's gonna die soon. is there anyway i can pay you the difference and trade up to a d2?" he put me on hold to ask his supervisor, and came back a few minutes later to say that they would send me a d2 at no extra cost. the d2 has been rock solid. and when you think about it... i only paid $129 for it!

the next drive i buy will be another d2.

--jon

One of my Lacie drives was intermittent, and I wound up sending it back to Lacie several times. They were very reluctant to give me a new drive and kept trying to fix the old one. And I got a lot of accusatory crap, "you must have done this etc..."

I was told by some helpful soul to upgrade the firmware for 911 chips, and it killed one of my LaCie Porche 80. I got an RA and sent it in, got a new replacement, no questions asked...

<L>