Firewire driver for Western Digital MyBook Home Edition?

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Level 1

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Firewire driver for Western Digital MyBook Home Edition?

I am having trouble getting a Firewire connection from my Intel Core 2 Duo iMac to a new Western Digital MyBook Home Edition 1TB external drive (the USB connection works fine). Firewire worked for a few weeks and then stopped. I updated the drive's firmware, reformatted the drive, tried everything their support people could think of. From what I can see in online discussions, this seems to be a known problem with Leopard and the MyBook Home hard drive. Western Digital finally suggested I check if Apple has a newer driver that I need in order to solve the problem. The hard drive does work with Firewire on an old eMac using OSX 10.4, and a different Firewire hard drive (an old Maxtor) does work with Leopard on my iMac. As a last resort Western Digital will offer replacing my drive with a Studio edition of the MyBook drive (they say it is more compatible with my Mac), but I am first following their suggestion of at least checking for help with drivers. I can't see anything about special or new Firewire drivers on the Apple site. Am I missing something? Thanks.

iMac 24-inch, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Apr 10, 2009 12:15 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,709 points

Apr 10, 2009 12:19 PM in response to Usher47

There is no newer driver. New drivers are typically distributed as part of a system update is new drivers are part of the update. You should contact AppleCare to determine if this is something repairable under your warranty.

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Answer 2

Apr 10, 2009 12:23 PM in response to Usher47

Hi Usher47;

I had an external drive ( not from Western Digital) that refused to work on Firewire either 400 or 800. I call the support for it. They had me RMA it back to them. The result was that the bridge chip was only working on USB. After they replaced the chip, it started work again.

To the best of my knowledge Firewire is built into OS X and is not a driver per se.

Allan

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,709 points

Apr 10, 2009 12:30 PM in response to Allan Eckert

Allan,

I believe the driver is IOFireWireFamily.kext.

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Answer 4

Tim Haigh

Level 7

24,198 points

Apr 10, 2009 2:03 PM in response to Usher47

I purchased 3 of those drives at the same time, all of them had issues over firewire. WD did release a 'firmware' update a few months back promising better leopard compatibility. Then last month all three drives died within a week of each other. 1 month outside of the warranty period.

I removed the drives from the enclosures and they work fine inside other branded enclosures. So I conclude that the WD enclosures are not so good. I like their Hard drives but not their enclosures I wont get anymore.

They also have an annoying sleep function built into the firmware of the enclosure making them unsuitable as boot volumes.

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