karljam

Q: How do I disable FireWire in Mountain Lion?  Where are my Mountain Lion FireWire kexts?

I just installed Mountain Lion and when starting up in verbose mode the output starts printing this in an endless loop:

 

ERROR: FireWire (OHCI) TI ID 8025 built-in: handleUnrecoverableErrorInt

 

I have had this error before, and I am aware that my FireWire port is fried.  Ever since 10.5 I have resolved this problem by booting via Safe Mode and removing my firewire kernel extensions:

 

sudo mv /System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWire* /Users/karl/Desktop/

 

This does the trick.  After that, I have no problems with my computer (other than never being able to use FireWire).  I have to repeat this process every time I update or upgrade my OS.  By doing this, I get a few more years out of a late 2007 MacBook Pro at the cost of not having FireWire.  I'm OK with that. 

 

But I just upgraded to Mountain Lion, am back in the startup hang, and I cannot find any FireWire kexts in the Extensions folder whatsoever.  Where are they? Or does anyone know how to get rid of FireWire in Mountain Lion?

MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2008), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 4 GB DDR2 SDRAM

Posted on Dec 25, 2012 6:24 PM

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Q: How do I disable FireWire in Mountain Lion?  Where are my Mountain Lion FireWire kexts?

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  • Helpful answers

  • by Topher Kessler,Helpful

    Topher Kessler Topher Kessler Oct 18, 2015 3:14 PM in response to karljam
    Level 6 (9,866 points)
    Oct 18, 2015 3:14 PM in response to karljam

    Those same kexts should be in the location you described. With these removed, see if the system has in fact loaded firewire extensions by running the following:

     

    kextstat | grep FireWire

  • by karljam,

    karljam karljam Dec 25, 2012 7:39 PM in response to Topher Kessler
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Dec 25, 2012 7:39 PM in response to Topher Kessler

    Hi Topher,

     

    Before I saw your post and had a chance to try it, I complicated things by going into Safe Mode and moving some other IO extensions to my Desktop.  Since I couldn't find IOFireWire* related kexts, I moved some other kexts starting with "IO" that I mistakenly thought might be related to FireWire.  I don't recall all of them, but IOStorageFamily, IOPCIFamily, and IODVDFamily were in there.  Naturally this didn't work and I'm facepalming a lot right now.

     

    I figured I could always undo this by booting from my old Snow Leopard DVD, or going into Single User mode, and copying back the extensions from my desktop.  However, now when I want to undo my stupidity, all startup options seem to fail:

     

     

    • Boot to Recovery Disk -> FireWire error loop
    • Boot to Installation DVD -> Hang at Apple logo
    • Safe Mode -> panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff800064c99b): "Unable to find driver for this platform: \"ACPI\".\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1699.32.7/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1 504

     

    Also, once I've gone into Single User mode and run

     

         /sbin/fsck -y and

         /sbin/mount -uw /

     

    ..I don't see /Users.  Thus I cannot find the moved extensions.

     

    Any thoughts on ways to get my extensions back so I can proceed to troubleshoot the FireWire-related ones?

  • by Topher Kessler,Helpful

    Topher Kessler Topher Kessler Oct 18, 2015 3:14 PM in response to karljam
    Level 6 (9,866 points)
    Oct 18, 2015 3:14 PM in response to karljam

    Yeah, you hosed the IO systems that OS X uses to...well...run.

     

    Your user account should be in the /Users/username directory, which you ought to be able to access in Single User mode; however, if not then you can always boot to the OS X Recovery HD partition (hold command-R at startup) and then reinstall OS X. This will keep your data and account intact and reinstall OS X behind it all, restoring these files and getting you back up and running.

  • by karljam,

    karljam karljam Jan 3, 2013 9:52 AM in response to Topher Kessler
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Jan 3, 2013 9:52 AM in response to Topher Kessler

    Doh.

     

    Well, booting to Recovery Disk causes OS X to try to load its FireWire extensions which throw me into the aforementioned handleUnrecoverableErrorInt error loop. 

     

    I am away from my computer until the 8th but will come back then and see if I can boot from an external USB HD that has the FireWire extensions removed from its OS X.  I'll post back here to report how that goes.  Thanks for the helping hand on Christmas Day!

  • by karljam,

    karljam karljam Jan 9, 2013 10:19 AM in response to Topher Kessler
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Jan 9, 2013 10:19 AM in response to Topher Kessler

    I didn't have the bootable USB I thought, but I can still boot into single-user mode, so I gathered more information.

     

    After single user mode starts up, / contains only the following files:

     

    .DS_Store

    .file

    .vol

    Applications (contains Safari and Utilities only)

    Install OS X Mountain Lion.app

    Library

    System

    Volumes

    bin

    dev

    etc

    private

    sbin

    tmp

    usr

    var

     

    From hdiutil info I see:

    file:///OS X Install Data/InstallESD.dmg is disk1

    file:///BaseSystem.dmg is disk2, and disk2s2 is mounted at /.

     

    I checked out the disks in /dev and used fstyp to find their filesystems, and I confirmed that disk0 must be my HDD, partition 1 being my hosed drive with the missing extensions.

     

    I guess Mountain Lion didn't finish installing or something? 

     

    What should I do next? When I try to mount disk0s2 I get "resource busy."  I can occasionally boot to DVD but installations hang for hours.

  • by T.V.deJong,

    T.V.deJong T.V.deJong Oct 11, 2015 11:50 AM in response to karljam
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Safari
    Oct 11, 2015 11:50 AM in response to karljam

    Hi Karl,

     

    Had the same issue here on my late 2007 MacBook after upgrading to El Capital.

     

    After teaching myself how to work with single user mode, turns out the files are still in the same folder. Strangely:

     

    cd /System/Library/Extensions

     

    contained 6 kext files.

     

    cd /System/Library

    cd Extensions

     

    contained a long list of kext files, including the IOFireWire files.

     

    I have deleted the FireWire files and my MacBook is now up and running again, obviously without a functioning FireWire port.

     

    For reference, what is the difference between the 2 Extensions folders?

  • by karljam,

    karljam karljam Oct 18, 2015 3:23 PM in response to T.V.deJong
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Oct 18, 2015 3:23 PM in response to T.V.deJong

    Hi T.V.,

     

    It sounds like they are the same folder, but in one case you accessed it in single user mode (and found 6 kexts), and in the other case, you cd'ed into it after a normal boot-up (and found more).  Is that correct?

     

    If that is the case, I suspect that the folder you see in single user mode actually belongs to a different file system, one that is only used when booting to single user.  Changes you make to that system are not reflected in the same folders when your device has been booted up as normal.

     

    Good work keeping a dinosaur MacBook alive!  It's hard work but you learn a lot in the process

  • by T.V.deJong,

    T.V.deJong T.V.deJong Nov 10, 2015 1:31 PM in response to karljam
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Safari
    Nov 10, 2015 1:31 PM in response to karljam

    Hi Karljam,

     

    No, everything was done in single user mode. It turns out that with this Mountain Lion the Firewire files are in /Library/Extensions and not in /System/Library/Extensions.

     

    Keeping the dinosaur alive is hard work indeed, but teaches a lot!