Firewire 800 port does not work

I bought a firewire 9 pin to 4 pin. Connected it to my sony HDV Handycam and my Mac Pro will not recognize it. Nothing is happening.

I'm fairly certain that it is NOT the cable because my camera is giving me the 'HDV/DV in' indicator whenever it is plugged in to the mac via the cable. However nothing happens on the Mac's end.

Is there anything I can do?

thanks

If you buy a firewire 800 drive that is not formatted for Apple, it will not automatically mount the drive under firewire 800. Meaning no icons will appear on your desktop.

You will plug it in and nothing will be apparent if you are looking for icons to appear on the desktop. However, you will be able to see the drive by using the Disk Utility (In the Utilities folder). You can then select it (select the volume, not the main drive) and "erase" it (not format it) as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) if you are going to use it exclusively on Macs.

Only then will you be able to automatically mount the drive and get the icons to appear.
Notice that this does not apply to firewire 400. If you use a regular firewire cable, you will see the drive mounting. So don't be scared if your computer does not see the drive under firewire 800 right away. It is there... just hidden.

I just bought a new 13" Macbook Pro. I am considering returning it. All my ext. hard drives and other computers must have the 400 firewire ports and I must have the 4 pin firewire to 400 firewire cable for my canon video camera zr700. There are no ports for my firewire cables....must be the 800 firewire port and wire is what I need (don't even recognize the 800 port) UGH. Did you return your Macbook Pro? Or did you find a solution for your camera and hard drives?

I dont know whether you still have the problem you have posted but i have a similar problem with my sony dcr-vx2000. I plug it into my macbook with a 9-4pin firewire cable with imovie open and nothing pops up or is detected. My camera says 'dv in' but nothing comes up on the mac. Have you resolved this issue? If you have please please could you tell me how to resolve this problem. thanks

I am in the same situation, my camera says "DV IN" and nothing happens? Someone has solved this issue ? Thanks

levingesundheit wrote:
Well, I don't have other Firewire 800 devices to try, so it could be the cable, but I really doubt it because so many other people are reporting problems with Firewire 800 being dead in these forums.

This is the Mac "emergency ward", levingesundheit. Never imagine that what you see here really reflects most people's experiences or provides a useful guide in situation like this. If you did you would get as distorted a view of reality as an alien arriving from outer space in the "road trauma" wing of a major hospital and assuming that human beings were therefore always bleeding all over the furniture! 😉

I have four FW800 devices attached to this computer as I type this. I have no probs with FW800 on either this computer or any of our others.

Cheers

Rod

levingesundheit wrote:
A lot of people have found that even with the correct cables, Firewire 800 is not working.

Well, I'm not sure about "a lot", but far, far more have found that it works perfectly, levingesundheit, as I see you have subsequently found yourself after replacing that dodgy third party cable / adaptor!

Cheers

Rod

So what software are you using, Rob_iMX, and how are you going about trying to get the computer to "recognise" the camera? You may want to note that what you seemingly want is a connection "out" from the camera to the computer, rather than the other way around, that you say works fine?

Message was edited by: Rod Hagen

Are you trying to record to the camera or transfer from the camera to the computer, fpardoseco?

Hey, I have a vx2000 and it will not show up on my macbook pro 13 inch when i plug it in through a firewire cable. Im trying to transfer footage from the camera onto the macbook but it wont detect the camera not even in system profiler. Is it an issue with the camera or macbook? Please help!