External Firewire hard drive won't mount

I have a feeling that System Profiler is only seeing the Firewire bridge chip in the case, not the HD. I suspect the HD is defective, or possibly needs the master/slave/cable select jumpers changed.

I have 2 MyBook 320GB drives not showing up on desktop and one 250GB not showing up on Laptop, what the ****!!!!!!!!

Alex,

I've not looked into this, but my LaCie external DVD drive always mounts if the disc has a recognized file system, but it doesn't always display an icon on the screen. However, my applications are FreeBSD ones ported to MacOSX.

Until this is resolved, why not check Darwin for mounted devices: in Terminal, type cd /dev, then just ls, then scroll to see what devices are attached and what filesystems are mounted. MacOSX clearly recognizes busses & even a bridge (EIDE to Firewire). Are all your filesystems mounted on both computers in Darwin? (That's really what matters.)

Bruce

PS. If 'System Profiler' doesn't recognize a device, its driver (kernal extension) doesn't work.

I have the same exact issue with a Maxtor One Touch 4plus. I've had it working for a few days. Used it as my time machine backup. I just noticed today that the drive was not mounted, so I unplugged everything, restarted, and no mounting luck. Apple System Profiler says that there is an unknown firwire 400 device. Incidentally my iSight is plugged in through it and that works but the drive is not being seen or mounted.

Any help is appreciated.

I'm experiencing the same issues with a MacBook Pro and a Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 500 GB External Hard Drive. It worked for a few days as my Time Machine backup, but I noticed it had abruptly unmounted and it refuses to remount.

FWIW, I mounted my drive via USB, ran a disk repair on it (Disk Utility found "Incorrect number of Extended Attributes," and was then able to mount it via Firewire 800 as I normally do.

Hi miqq

I also have an old QPS-Que! firewire and I remember trying to use it as a IDE/ATA hard disk bridge with no success. It was a long time ago (OS X 10.2 and OS 9.2.) but I remember putting a HFS+ formatted drive inside, so I guess that the filesystem is irrelevant and the issue in on the QBP-2 Bridge itself. However It does work with CD/DVD drives.

BTW I am using mine with a Lite-On DVD-RW but I can only get writing speeds up to 4X. How well did yours perform with the Sony DVD-RW drive?

Just wanted to thank Erich for the idea of using USB to connect to an external firewire drive that needed repair and couldn't be found by Disk Utility using the firewire connect.

It's nice to have another, smarter head from time to time.

Franz