Disable Firewire?

I started up the G4, then connected it to my MacBook Pro. I hadn't held down the correct keyboard shortcut (no connected display, so it was guess-and-check), so I hit the G4's reset button and held down 't'. I thought I had a bad cable, but realized that both FW ports on the MBP were dead after testing some other devices. I restarted the MBP and it hung at the blue screen, and once it successfully booted it wouldn't cleanly sleep or shut down.

Paulerskine, that absolutely did the trick! Thank you!

I had the same symptoms as Davidaz and the other posters: slow boot and no wake from sleep, and it all started as soon as I loaded Leopard onto my G4 powerbook 15". I also, like Davidaz and other posters, have a dead Firewire port. I have sporadically crawled the Internet for the last three weeks researching G4 sleep issues under Leopard, but I never connected the sleep problem to my dead Firewire until this morning. Searching for "G4 sleep Firewire" lead me here and your suggestion about the IOFireWire files has worked beautifully. It now wakes from sleep as well as it did under Panther, and doesn't take six minutes to boot up either. Thanks again. You've given me another year or more of use out of this machine.

I'm curious as to if you tried installing a third party Firewire Express Card to get your Firewire capabilities back again.

In my case I would be trying to install a Firewire PCI card. I would really love to have firewire back again.

I too had the dead firewire/sleep problem and deleted the Firewire Extension files to enable sleep/wake up.

Thanks,
Jason

I have a Quicksilver that reported a dead Firewire port when you watched Verbose startup, hung often, slept badly, and similar problems. It failed the Apple G4 diagnostic CD-ROM test.

Chasing a somewhat different problem, I ended up checking the memories in that unit versus some others, and in the process of debugging, shifted all the DIMMs down one slot. The problem went away. For months.

Much later, I attacked the memories with fervor, and ran a series of overnight tests with Rember. The answer was that one of the DIMMs, if placed so that the program did NOT use its memory for execution, only for storage, failed after many passes, with entire-byte data errors. The module has a refresh problem that only occurs under certain circumstances.

Thanks to the lifetime warranty, I was a able to order a new DIMM from Data Memory Systems at no cost, and replaced the failing DIMM the next day. My "Firewire problem" is gone.

I must say, after seeing this and similar threads, I'm scared to ever use Firewire again!

I also seem to have blown out my FW ports. Removing the drivers certainly fixes Leopard's boot and sleep issues.

I don't have the money to replace my entire logic board. Is there a way to disable the Firewire hardware through EFI? Although Windows XP and Ubuntu are not suffering as poorly as Leopard was, I would like the busted hardware inaccessible to all my OSes...

I had exactly the same problem on my MacBook. My Firewire inexplicably failed (even though I don't use it). It took a lot of Googling to find this thread, but moving the extensions files as suggested worked a treat, so thanks a lot! It also worked every time there was an update to Mac OS and the problem resurfaced.

However...

I have just upgraded to Snow Leopard and the problem returned. No problem, I thought, I'll just follow the same procedure. I have done so, and have checked that the files are definitely not in their original location. But the problem persists.

The symptoms are exactly the same (long start up times, not rewakening if I close the laptop), so I really think it's the same issue. But the fix no longer works.

Anyone got any ideas? Anyone know what snow leopard might be doing differently?

Okay, scrap that! It now works!

The difference was that I was doing a restart before, but I tried a complete shutdown, then turned the machine back on, and that did the trick.

So for anyone experiencing the same, don't restart, shutdown instead.

I don't have any of the sleep/wake issues, however I do feel I have a blown/dead firewire port on one of/both of my mac computers.

I am running a 24'' imac & a 13'' MacBook and cannont create a firewire connection between the two computers. I have tried many online firewire set-up guides to no avail. I followed the steps and nothing shows up in network connections on either mac.

In System Preferences/Network - Even when the firewire cable is connected, it tells me there is no connection present. Is this telling me that my firewire port is dead? Or have I simply not set up the connection properly. Is there a recommended site for setting up a Firewire connection that somebody could help me with.

Cheers, Dan

Reading this post, I have determined how to disable a firewire port, can anybody help me with re-enabling mine so that I can create a connection between both of my macs.

Just to add....

The MacBook is running Tiger & the iMac is running Leopard. If this makes a difference.

Many Thanks.