Firewire issues after Snow Leopard...

What's really frustrating is that the external that won't mount does show up in System Profiler. I wish I had an external power supply for it--read somewhere that can do the trick--and suggest that anyne who does, try it!

10.6.3 is out today and no luck for me and Firewire (surprise, surprise). Any of you guys have a different story to tell?

10.6.3 came out today, did the update, and it my external FW400 dvd NEC drive is working again!

Since I installed the Leopard firewire kext files on my Snow Leopard system in order to use my Freecom drives, I reverted back to the Snow Leopard ones before applying the 10.6.3 update. And it finally works !

My external FW400 Sony BD writer (oxford chipset) works fine with 10.6.3 ! At last !

I just installed 10.6.3 on my Macbook Pro. I have the Western Digital "Passport" with the Firewire AND USB connector. I just tested the Firewire800 - the drive was recognized (as before) - but when I attempted to copy a 2Gb file (using "Duplicate File") - it manages to copy a certain amount (about 350Mb) - and then freezes. This has been continuously occurring since I upgraded my mac to Snowleopard. I have attempted the Kex file installs - but nothing really works. The drive works flawlessly under USB by the way - and the drive works flawlessly as a firewire drive on a Windows machine - so it definitely is still snow leopard.

Firewire is apples baby. Its embarrassing that this doesn't all work together. I really would love to be able to run at the Firewire 800 speeds....

I have symptoms similar to altquark's---an external drive with Firewire 800 and USB interfaces, and when connected over Firewire it eventually freezes. It lasted for a few days this time, which made me think 10.6.3 had fixed it, but it finally did freeze just as before. The trigger seemed to be a laptop putting a Time Machine backup on it over the network.

Gratifyingly this is the top hit for '"snow leopard" firewire' on Google.

Hi guys.

I have the same problems of altquark and Robert here.

I own a WD Passport Studio, USB+Firewire 800, I updated to SL 10.6.3, but I have still Firewire issue with both my mac (MP + MBP).
In usb mode all ok (but slow), in FW mode, with big files, or multiple files, after some gigabytes, the copy process freeze!

I tried also to download WD drivers for Mac, but same problems.

Please Apple, do something!

Of my 8 external hard drives, only 3 include FW800 and they're the ONLY ones having these erratic troubles. Mostly they won't mount, but sometimes lately they just "unmount". The three are a WD 2TB MyBook Studio Series, an OWC 2TB Mercury Elite-AL Pro and a portable OWC 500GB Mercury Elite-AL Pro. They don't work in FW400 mode either. I'm using them with USB for now.

All my FW400 drives run flawlessly--which includes waking up from sleep.

BTW, this only started happening the past few weeks and I'm running 10.5.8.

I'm seeing the same issue. Here is my info just incase Apple is watching...

Ever since I installed 10.6, the firewire 400 and 800 has been freezing on my Macbook Pro (1st gen) on both external hard drive and dvd burners. It freezes using my Belkin Firewire 800 expresscard or the on-board Firewire 400. No problems when I move back to 10.5. 10.6.3 doesn't solve these issues for me.

Sometimes I can get the drive to show up for 10-20 minutes and use it, but usually it freezes. Almost every time it'll freeze on waking up from sleep. After it freezes, Finder goes crazy and I have to force close it. If I try to load it up, it gives me an error and I end up doing a hard reset.

Also seeing the same issue since last software upgrade last week. I have a Seagate 1 Tb HD serving as my Time Capsule connected via firewire through Cinema display. Stopped working immediately post upgrade which i did not detect until a week later.

Also found my idisk was not syncing properly after the update which ultimately caused a loss of several documents, Very strange - never had these issues before the upgrade.

I repaired all disks with Disk Utility and everything seems back to normal and had to reset synchronization of the idisk which resulted in my losing some docs but is working smoothly again.

I have the same OWC Mercury Elite 750GB external drive connected via firewire 400. Makes computer unresponsive; sometimes won't shut down until I manually turn off the OWC drive. Any fix yet? Did you hear from OWC? Thanks.

No improvement--and no news from Apple that I've heard.

To reiterate: all of my drives w/FW800 refuse to work at either 800 or 400 speed. Gotta use USB on all three of my Intel Macs (all running 10.5.8). My older FW drives that have ONLY 400 work just fine.

It seems to not only be a drive/audio issue.

We use Sony DSR-11 DVCam decks. They've had major issue with timecode since the beginning (all of our systems came with SL installed so we can't downgrade). Recently, we had a firewire 400 drive go corrupt when using the Avid Media Composer editing software. Then another one. Turns out the firewire through the drive and the firewire through the deck was really messing things up. I used the extensions fix that I saw in here and while I can't use both the drive and deck through firewire, it seems that the deck alone through firewire works really well now and keeping the drive USB seems to be OK. We're getting ready to install 30 of these systems and this is all pretty scary. I'm trying to work with our apple rep directly. So far, nothing.

I have an Oxford 934DBS based USB2.0, FW400/800 eSATA drive case with a 2TB drive installed connected to my iMac by FW800.

SYMPTOM:

It will run for varying amounts of time before freezing. What's most frustrating is that finder and any application that attempts to open a load/save file dialogue also subsequently freezes until the whole system is unresponsive.

Terminal will also freeze if it attempts to list the directory contents of the /Volume/ mount point.

Unsuccessful recovery methods:

●　Clicking an eject (X) in finder permanently locks up finder and causes a -10810 error on relaunch.
●　I am unable to unload the kexts while in such a frozen state. Kexts in use error.
●　I am unable to force an unmount. Terminal completely freezes with a pthread timeout error.

Workarounds:

●　I must physically disconnect the drive or power it down and the whole system comes back to life within seconds.
●　I can often reconnect/switch it on again a few seconds later and continue to access it but as I mentioned, the drive appears to die randomly, sometimes within minutes thereafter.

primary observations:

●　It would appear that every time a crash has occurred (most often in my absence), Time Machine has been running (noted by an ever rotating arrow on the backup partition of the external drive icon in finder's left-hand bar)

additional observations:

●　Light access to individual files has not AFAIKR caused a freeze.

●　Once a freeze occurs, subsequent heavy accesses are likely to cause additional freezes within minutes of access starting.

●　Resetting the system seems to let the drive work for some time before it crashes.

●　My old Epson FW scanner which is connected via another 4 drive RAID external box (which also seems prone to freezing recently) has never skipped a beat.

●　I have an old FW400 oxford chipset (911???) external connected to a Cube server with 10.5.8 and a on 24/7 that works perfectly, but a daisy chained FW drive with a PL chipset constantly froze on wakeup.

I really hope that apple doesn't pass the ball and blame the chipset manufacturers again.