Firewire issues after Snow Leopard...

thanks Amstel.

I don't know what I did, but it 'seems' to be working just fine now.

I did reset PRAM 3 times in a row. Not sure if that matters or not, but I worked all day yesterday and most of Saturday without the issue repeating itself.

I also updated the latest Java update. Again, not sure if that matters or not, but i'm good to go (so far).

oh, i did repair permissions again with Onyx.

Cheers and good luck,
Keebler

Just bought an Oxford chipset external case with FW800 and put two Seagate 1.5TBs in it. Seems to work perfectly under SL and FW800.

Here is the results of my call with Apple.

Because the fault where the Freecom drive works under a clean install of 10.6.x but goes really slow after an upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 apple have decided it is a Freecom fault and are not going to do anything more about the problem that I reported. They don't seem to be interested in everyone else having the problem with different drives.

My choices are to reinstall 10.6 and then re-install every App and maybe the Freecom drive will work again.

Use the work around that works for me until 10.6.3 comes out and hope Apple might have fixed the problem.

Chase Freecom for the fix they have been working on for 2 months. They cant be bothered to answer my emails any more

Throw away my Freecom drive and buy something else.

I'll decide in the next few days what to do.

Just to add another case study

Been running 10.5.x without any OS related issues. Had to Firewire external drives (Oxford chipset I believe) daisy connected - and all was well.

I was an early updater to SL and initially I found no issues.

I always update as per Apples recommendations.

About two weeks ago I started getting intermittent failures when waking the iMac from sleep. Eventually these got worse to the point when applications open at the time of going to sleep got corrupted. Did my research, reset PRAM etc, etc. Things got from bad to worse, getting to the point that the system would not start and the disk utility gave up on it. Luckily DiskWarrior came to the rescue.

Had a long discussion with apple support who claimed that the sleep mode issue appeared with 10.6.1 update but got fixed with 10.6.2. As nothing we tried seemed to help it was suggested that I nuke the system and rebuild from scratch. Given the number of applications and volume of data this is a most unwelcome news.

To ensure that I loose nothing I bought a new 1TB WD My Book. Connected same by daisy-chaining it to the existing Firewire 800 drives.

By this time I changed the powersaving mode to disable the drive going to sleep.

The problems just got worse still. I need to transfer some old stuff from the old external drive to the WD new drive. After several crashes I gave up. Assuming that this could be related to the iMac problem I connected the drives to my macBook. That did not even recognised the drives till I changed the order (older one first) then it also crashed.

I started reading some of the comments in this thread and tried the following.

Back on the iMac connected the old Firewire drive to the iMac's 800Mb port and then connected the WD My Book via USB and restarted the copying. As I write this 62MB have been copied.

So where does this leave us? Are the problems chipset specific? Is it all to do with SL? Will Apple fix this?

There are many reasons why advanced users choose Macs the benefits of having multiple Firewire devices connected simultaneously was an important consideration.

Wish me luck with the rebuild.

My Freecom problem was on a MacBook Pro which had a clean install of Snow Leopard.Don't waste your time and effort on a clean install.
I'm back on Leopard 10.5.8 and everything is rosy again. SL was a mistake I won't be making again.

I have a Western Digital My Book

I have had a similar issues with my Digidesign Digi002R and external firewire drives... and these are not cheap drives, one is a Glyph and the other is an enclosure from OWC (with the new oxford chipset).

I originally thought the issue was due to upgrading to 10.6.2, as I had installed 10.6 and updated to 10.6.1 months ago without issues, then suddenly after updating 10.6.2/iTunes/Safari one day my firewire started crashing constantly.

I was able to fix the issue for a few weeks by simply reverting back to before I did the 10.6.2 update, and everything was working fine.

But last night all my firewire units crashed while I was trying to record some audio... oh joy, it's back!

I've been researching my issues all day, and the best I can come up with is that either 10.6 has a serious firewire bug somewhere, or this is a larger bug related to many more 10.6 instability issues... example of non-firewire issues:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/backstage/comments/problems-with-mac-os-x-10.6- snow-leopard-join-the-sizable-minority/

While running 10.5, all my firewire units worked great. Digi002R plugged in to FW400, Glyph drive (which I record directly onto) plugged in to FW800, and the OWC drive daisy-chained through the second FW800 port on the Glyph drive.

I also use the Digi002R as my main audio interface, with my studio monitors acting as the computers speakers. CoreAudio loads when I login and connects to the Digi002R and sets that as my default audio output. But if I try to plug-in one of the FW800 and turn it on, the drive will show up, but the firewire crashes and then reboots before it does, which crashes CoreAudio and then audio doesn't work until I reboot. Same thing also happens when I have one of the FW drives and the Digi002R on before starting up my computer, except it usually waits to crash until I try to open something like iTunes.

The really confusing part is that firewire was created by Apple, so how can a standard that is created by them have such issues with their own operating system.

Sadly it looks like I'm going to have to go back to 10.5. I really hope Apple recognizes (and fixes) this epic flaw in 10.6 soon.

Message was edited by: musek

I feel Apple are getting rid of firewire (new MacBooks don't have it) and is looking towards USB 3.0, 4.8 Gbps or Light Peak, 10 Gbps. In the mean time I think some interfaces are not compatible with SL e.g. Prolific. Are you daisy chaining through a Prolific device?

I'm not daisy-chaining through a Prolific chipset... the Glyph GT 062 & the OWC Mercury 2.5" enclosures don't use Prolific chipset for the firewire ports, they use the more reliable (and more widely accepted) Oxford chipset.

The OWC Mercury 2.5" enclosures do use Prolific chipsets for USB 2.0, but I don't use that port on my drive as it's not fast enough for my needs.

We have all heard the rumors that Apple is moving away from firewire. If they are true, then Apple is not only going to make a lot of people angry (as they did when the aluminum MacBooks came out without firewire), but they will likely lose a huge portion of the pro audio/video market.

I personally don't feel like Apple will remove firewire from it's professional line of computers, as firewire has already become the professional standard for most pro audio/video devices. Plus, firewire is evolving, the S3200 standard (aka FW3200) has already been approved by IEEE, which will bring speeds of 3.2 Gbits/s, and firewire is expected to reach speeds of up to 6.4 Gbit/s with the P1394d standard (aka FW6400). Then again, I don't work for Apple, so I can't really say what Jobs has in mind for the future of Apple... but, I can tell you it would be a huge mistake if Apple was to get rid of firewire entirely.

But more to the point of this discussion, 10.6 has firewire support... and beyond that, even if Apple was to get rid of firewire from future devices, they still need to support it in the OS as currently every MacBook Pro still has at least FW800 (mine has both FW400 & FW800) and the early MacBooks had FW400... and that's not even mentioning the Mac Pros, which have never lost firewire, in fact the lastest models come with 4 FW800 ports.

The issue is definitely OS based, as I am now back on 10.5.8 with no issues at all. So even taking the "future of firewire" out of the picture, this is still a huge flaw in 10.6 that Apple needs to fix.

I recently bought two 2TB LaCie D2 drives for my 27" iMac to help with the vast amounts of media data I have.

Speeds are appalling with 50GB taking 2hours to migrate. Sometimes it's faster to do this wirelessly.
I'm interested to hear why I'm having speed issues with this. I've even formatted the drives in different methods to see if it's the file system, but I'm convinced it's the transfer rate.

Interesting to note also that the new Mac Book's no longer come with firewire port.

Hi, I am a newbee on this forum but a long time
Apple user (professionally) since 1991.
Just yesterday my new MacPro Quad arrived with the
30" ACD. Ofcourse withe Snow Lep installed.
Needless to add I encountered the same serious troubles when
hooking up a chain of 4 Firewire back up disks. All FW 400's.
Neither of them are recognized properly. Only one of them
showed up once on my desktop to my surprise. But when I clicked to
open it I got the message: this device is badly damaged and can not
be read and should be initialised.
When I hooked it up back again to my old Mac I got the same message.
Meaning all the data (Around 500+ GB) are lost! This is serious trouble, Apple!
What's the matter?!
I also can't hook up my old Mac to copy the HD's trouhh Firewire.

I am at the point about seriously regretting I updated
my ancient system. And you would not believe where I come from
as a professinal illustrator artist:
Powermac 7600 with OS 8.6. Still working flawlessy.
Obvisiously it is no match to the MacPro in terms of power and features but this is an
issue that I can't overcome and forces me to keep working
on the ol' Mac the next weeks or months. The MacPro fetching dust in the corner.

C'mon Apple, This very dissapointing.

Yah I really wish Apple would fix this as well. I've been able to do some of the methods posted earlier in this forum and that's at least given me stable fw400, not 800 which is weird. Lately I've just been having my 800s attached to my macbook pro and I access them across a wired network. Honestly to me its like having a broken solution. Please Apple if you can shed any light on this. This is making me and my company leery about upgrading any of our machines at this point. We keep almost all of our film footage on external fw800 drives for editing.

I'm glad to see some input from pro video users as well, being that my original post mainly pertained to pro audio...

I figured I should add an update since I've been downgrade and mostly stable for a little over a week now... and yes, I did say mostly stable, not compete fixed.

Everything seems to work well for me, but if any of my firewire drives (all FW800) has an error, everything crashes. This has only happened a couple times and the drives come back up, but not the audio interface. Of course that's probably because the audio interface connects to coreaudio when the computer starts up, which means that a reboot is necessary for the audio interface to come back up... which is pretty frustrating when you are in the middle of work with several things open, but whatever.

My firewire audio interface had "crashed" a couple times early this week... though part of that was my stupidity, as I had my audio interface set to shutdown once the last audio application quit, which means that when I closed iTunes or Quicktime without then restarting (or at least logging out and then back in) I had no audio output anymore. That is now fixed, and no real issues there.

So it looks like (as Strongbmw pointed out) that FW400 seems pretty stable, at least for me on 10.5.8 (can't say for 10.6 anymore as I'm waiting before upgrading again). However, FW800 still seems weird from time to time, it's overall stable and I don't have any big issues like I did while on 10.6, but there are occasional hiccups that can cause all firewire to crash. Of course, generally after a restart everything is back up, but that can be annoying when your in the middle of work.

Hi,
I found this link where the firewire problem is adresses
with a possible solution:

http://www.ripdifferent.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=11351&start=0&sid=353db26 75149926f263814ef82e79834

It seems the problem lies in the OFirewireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext extension
of SL. If this extension is replaced with the one from 10.5x Leopard everything seems to work fine.
At least that is what I read. I can't test it since I don't have 10.5x.

Can anyone send me the OFirewireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext extension of 10.5x? I'd appreciate
it very much.
Or will I have to purchase a full package of 10.5x to get my 4000.00 dollar machine running
as it should?

Has anyone tried seriousjones solution of replacing the OFirewireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext extension with the one from 10.5 ?

If it works, I'll happily send on the extension to anyone who needs it.

Please don't point out that this would be in violation of the Apple Terms and Conditions...
IMHO it's an extreme violation not to have addressed this major OS issue by now.

Thanks.