Firewire issues after Snow Leopard...

Somewhere near the beginning of this thread someone put up a link to all the 10.5 files you can replace to try to get firewire back (I believe it was macmini user who posted). Doing that is what got me a stable fw400 but still no 800.

Today I'm just biting the bullet. I'm going back to 10.5.8 honestly. It's a pain in the *** but I need the higher speed drives for some projects. I've just read that a SL 10.6.3 update beta got seeded to developers which has over 255 fixes in it, totaling around 600 megs of data. Hopefully when that goes live there will be a fix in there.

Overall I like snow leopard as I have seen an increase in power on my end, especially on rendering times being shorter, but not having the fw800 access is killing me. Here's hoping for a fix from Apple soon!

In my changing the IO file decrease the system stability and... did not resolve the FW800 problem with my LaCie drive and my Focusrite soundcard. When I'm working with professionnal audio/video, I use a Leopard partition, work like a charm... Hope 10.6.3 resolve this but I doubt...

Thanks for posting the 10.6.3 news - my Freecom 1TB simply will not mount since SL installed - so all my hopes are now pinned on 10.6.3. Fingers crossed. If that doesn't work it's back to 10.5.8...

I'm hoping for 10.6.3 or a firmware update from WD to sort this out. I have 3 WD Passport Studio 500's and they are all unreliable with Firewire. Sometimes they are fine (they all mount with no problem), but occasionally when I'm backing up my iTunes, which is around 400GB, they just stop dead, and the only way out is to Force Quit. All 3 of the drives work perfectly with USB, and in fact because they have what WD call 'Turbo Drivers' they are pretty fast, so I stick to that most of the time.

Another unhappy Macbook Pro / Snow Leopard user here... I have two Lacie Firewire drives, an older 250GB model and a newer 500GB model.

The newer drive mounts and works perfectly under Snow Leopard.

The older drive will not mount reliably using FW400 or FW800. Sometimes it just won't mount at all, other times it goes through a cycle of spinning up, then spinning down several times and eventually it does mount.

I upgraded the firmware on the older drive but the problem still persists.

It's been a while since I posted last on this topic. Has this been resolved at all yet?? I'm still running 10.5.8 with not a single firewire glitch on any device. I would like to go to 10.6 but won't unless this is fixed.
Perhaps Apple are too busy messing about with iPad to be arsed about fixing serious problems with SL. They seem to have a belief that all is fine.
Whatever happened to "Everything Just Works" on a Mac?

The next SL update only fixes Firewire DVD drive issues...***? This is total B.S. - my superfast firewire 800 drives are completely crippled at 2MB/sec write speeds. It makes them unusable. APPLE-FIX THIS. NOW!

This reminds me...I saw a news report on the news touting Apple as the new Microsoft. I could't understand what they were saying but now it all makes sense...

on a new intel imac with 10.6.2, i have no firewire issues whatsoever.

I will honestly say that its not the mac- its your enclosure. Firewire enclosures are made with varying degrees of bridge quality. If you are not sticking to LAcie or OWC, then you are taking a chance. Only recently - literally the last 2 years or so- have WD/Seagate's externals have been pushing mac compatibility. The problem is, these companies never cared about macs, so f course they didn't invest much of anything into their driver/FW bridge development. It is not about a conspiracy theory, but as with many of you, I have been buying externals since the G4 days, and its not hard to tell when your enclosure is acting up. Typically, it will be the only thing showing issues, and everything else will be fine. After the routine mac troubleshooting, its going to coem down to either/or.

ii have 6 external drives- 3 lacies, and 3 owcs.

- 2 lacies have always worked great, and the oldest one only occasionally takes a second power on for the computer to see it. but is reliable, 6 years strong.

- one OWC works great, my first one historically had mounting issues ONLY through firewire (usb 2.0 was jacked up on the g4's, lik3 my pbg4/15 so i couldn't use it).

-My first gen OWC ELite pro aluminum RAID case is pure junk. I mean, JUNK. it IS a driver/bridge issue- it cant be anything else if other OWC drives are working fine.

Even though Lacie used to have reliability issues, they have been rock solid for me af far as externals go. As well, competition has brought their premium pricing back to reality.

So essentially, nothing beats a company with specific mac compatible history. I will never buy a WD external. I omega has always been platform agnostic, but suffers from lousy customer service and reliability issues (basically, cheap parts). G-tech drives have been highly rated, but they are priced like apple makes them (aka, expensive). I cant even name any other companies, because pros (like me! :P) stick with the reliable big boys.


Take my advice as you will...but I will say, my externals are rocking. Sorry about yall issues.

Hello All:
This may not be an actual solution, but one of the responses on the thread worked for me. I am running OSX 10.6.2 and a Sony DRX-720 UL external drive. Leopard recognized it without problems, but not so SL.
However, it only seems to be a 'power-up' issue. I left power 'on' on the Sony and unplugged the firewire cable from its socket. Reconnecting the firewire did the trick. The 'device' is recognized, although not as a Sony drive, but as whatever the title of the CD/DVD that sits on the drive. In any event, it reads and plays. Did not try to burn to it, though.
Many thanks.

Edward,
It's good to hear you have no Firewire issues, but the issues we are all experiencing have only manifested themselves with Snow Leopard. On the same hardware with Leopard, the drives all operate flawlessly. In fact all my drives work on every Mac I own, from a G3 Pismo Powerbook, through a Titanium G4, Alum G4, IBook G4, and my MacBook Pro, and on OSs from OS9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.4, 10.5, Yellow Dog Linux, and Windows 98SE (in virtualisation), and XP via VMWare Fusion and Bootcamp (this also includes daisy chaining in all possible configurations - yes I had a bit of time on my hands to try all this). ONLY Snow Leopard causes a problem.
Now if it is an enclosure problem as you suggest (and I'm not discounting this conclusion, in fact I agree the different chipsets are the significant factor), why could Apple make them all work before, but cannot now. Something has been removed from the system (KEXT) files, which explains why some people have had success with replacing these from 10.5. I cannot risk making my Mac unstable by trying this (not yet anyway), but it seems to indicate where the solution may be.
Even if the problem is not directly of Apples making, they are annoying a lot of users who find themselves with more hardware for landfill, which offsets Apple's green credentials somewhat.
When OS X first came out I found myself with 3 printers which were unsupported. However GimpPrint resolved that fairly quickly, ported from the Linux community. If SL is supposed to be the first OSX version to be fully Unix compliant (where did I read that?) then the drives should be supportable, as they all work fine in Linux.
I am still of the opinion that something is broken in SL for Firewire, and Apple is the one who needs to fix it.

seems i've lost my fw400 port since upgrading to 10.6.2... can't mount any external hd, can't connect camcorder to final cut to capture as well... so does 10.6.2 have got a firewire issue? didn't have any problem with capturing or using fw400 to connect to external hd prior to 10.6.2... someone please help! tried repairing permissions, restarting, no good.

using first gen mbp 1.83 duo core, 2 gig ram, running on 10.6.2.

Hi Gerard,

This is a Snow Leopard issue, the only solution is to go back to 10.5.8 . You may find your camcorder works if directly connected to your MBP and the whole thing rebooted. This forces you to capture to your internal drive though.

Was any of this working in 10,6,1??

yea it was working in 10.6.1 until i finished a video project and did some aperture backups on another external via fw400. u think 10.6.3 might fix that problem? will try the reboot with camcorder first. seriously thinking of going back to 10.5.8...

Hello everyone,

Since some users, including myself, had still problems installing Leopard firewire kext files in SL, 10.6.2 in my case, I've found a better alternative than using Disk Uitlity or Kext Helper to repair permissions: Kext Uitility 2.3.2.
You just have to replace kext files and execute this utility, that's it ! (you may ignore any error message coming from SL during this action)
Kext Utility (thanks to the Hackintosh world: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=140647) can be found on my iDisk, together with the Leopard firewire kext files and all 10.6.2 original kexts: http://public.me.com/amaurymac.
By the way, for the french speaking forum readers, you can find this and other info on my blog: http://www.macmini.be.

Amaury

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link. <Edited by Host>