Firewire issues after Snow Leopard...

Just wanted to keep this topic going because this problem needs to be fixed. Without reliable FW800 my super-powerful iMac is basically a toy. USB is completely unacceptable for any serious professional use and obviously the internal drive is not enough space for a professional.

I won't bother with the details of my problems since they have been enumerated in this topic ad nauseum.

BTW, the KEXT fix didn't work for me and appears to have made things worse - perhaps it won't work on machines that were released AFTER Snow Leopard. Just a guess.

I have also posted Feedback and I recommend that everyone with this issue do the same since Apple will probably ignore the problem unless enough people get ****** off about it. Here is the addy:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

PLEASE APPLE. IF YOU ARE GOING TO INCLUDE FW800 ON YOUR MACHINES, MAKE SURE IT WORKS!

I'm an owner of a 24" iMac running the latest version of Snow Leopard. When I boot up my old 12" Powerbook G4 in target disk mode and plug it into my iMac's FW400 port, nothing happens. The system profiler says "Warning: Unable to list FireWire Devices."

It worked before SL. What a load of crap. I should go back to Leopard...

Add me to the long list of ******-off users who demand that Apple addresses this immediately.

I had the same issues as technojunkie.

I have SL 10.6.3 running with two FW800 drives: Lacie Little Big Disk 500GB and a Seagate FreeAgentDesk. With USB I have no problems with both the drives.

Resetting the PRAM resolved some of the issues as described by Technojunkie. Lately the issues came back. Daisy chaining the drives seem to make things worse.

I will try to replace the kext files of SL with those of 10.5.8. However, I don't have much hope for it to work.

It seems that Apple should give this problem the attention it needs..

I've been experiencing the same FW issues - on 10.6.3 iMac and MBP, and even on one 10.5.8 G5; using 6 different FW drives - 3 WD, 2 Seagate and 1 OWC. (Already had 2 FW drives that worked fine.) The following has fixed it for me - don't know why, don't know if it will work for others.

The short version appears to be: Some drives (FW chipsets) require GUID (Intel boot) formatting and some require an Apple Partition (PPC boot).

I reformatted all the FW drives - ones that were GUID I switched to Apple Partition and visa versa. I rebooted all three computers resetting the PRAM, SMC and NVRAM. All drives now mount and perform as expected. As a test I switched two of the drives back to their original formatting, and, they started having problems immediately. So I switched them back again and they work fine (although I did have to reboot and reset the iMac's and the G5's PRAM, SMC, NVRAM).

Get's crazier - putting GUID and Apple Partition drives on the same daisy chain seems to occasionally initiate the problem (and once it's initiated and starts showing up more often). If I reboot and keep a daisy chain all FW drives with the same format I never see a problem.

My wild, barely educated, guess is:
Some drives (FW chipsets) support only PPC boot volumes, some support only Intel boot volumes, some support both. It may even be more complex to diagnose - i.e. it's a combination of the computer/host FW chipset with specific FW drive chipsets that initiate the problem.

Hope this helps some of you - I'm sure glad to have my FW drives back.

I too am having fire wire issues on a Macpro running 10.6.3. The problem is much as others have described, drives will mount and I can write to them (substantial amounts of data) but after a few reads the application that was reading the disk (in my case one of two different disk cataloguing programs or the finder) would hang. Pulling the firewire (with resulting "Improper eject" warning dialogue) would clear the hang. This problem is utterly repeatable on this machine with anyone of 10 different enclosures and never occurs on any other machine. I have tested with a fresh (clean) combo install of 10.6.3 to no avail. I also tried installing the 10.5.8 Kexts, no difference. It seems my only option at this point is to go back to Leopard.

Apple??

I can also confirm the exact same behavior on a uni-body MBP 15"

I just purchased NEW Macbook Pro 13" two months ago.
Never had a issue with Lacie external with old PowerBook 15" on FW HD 800 or 400.

Now I have to hold the 800 cord in place on the NEW Laptop on the very first try.

Makes one wonder why all of a sudden,
all new laptops have been removed of FW ports accept MBP's.

This better not be an issue on my MacPro.

I had my 1.5TB Iomega HD, hooked up w/ FW800, formatted in Apple Partition, and was having Time Machine issues; it would hang and stick on "calculating changes" for days until I either quit through Activity Monitor or shut off the drive. On another thread, wiser minds than mine told me I needed to reformat with GUID, so I did. No improvement; it still hangs and has similar problems. So I don't think the apple partition/GUID switch is necessarily a solution. I'm running 10.6.2 on a 27" i5 iMac, and hesitant to upgrade to 10.6.3 because of all the horror stories, and because it doesn't sound like Apple got this fixed yet.

Unsolicited comment: I've owned Macs since my Mac Classic almost 20 years ago. First time I've ever wondered if I made the right decision. My last iMac ran for months without needing a reboot; this one has this problem, a Magic Mouse problem and others that make me think I need to restart every morning. Big disappointment.

Update to my post above. Switching to USB has completely solved the problem, so I'm confident this is a FW issue, not a Time Machine or partition issue. Still running 10.6.2, so it's a SL, but not 10.6.3 issue.

Did anyone see improvements after SL 10.6.4?

Well it's very early days but I think the 10.6.4 update has resolved the problem! (there is nothing in the readme to suggest it would ). I also note that the kexts remain unchanged (from 10.6.3) so I guess they were not the issue.


Nick-T

10.6.4 has fixed this for me too. My old Lacie disk mounts immediately now.

It also fixed a problem I was having with a firewire sound card (Motu Ultralite mk3 hybrid). I used to get noise on the inputs when bus powering the unit while my macbook pro was running from battery.

Just upgraded to 10.6.4 on my first gen MacBook Pro (Intel Core Duo) -- no fix for my Firewire 400 connection to my JVC GR-D93U camcorder. It is still unrecognized by iMovie 06 and 09. So don't hold your breath that all Firewire issues are fixed.

On top of that, I encountered Firefox font problems which I resolved by Removing the Duplicate fonts in FontBook.app.

I have this evening updated to Mac OS X 10.6.4 (10F569) so that I could update my iPhone 3G to 4.0

I hadn't tried Firewire800 for a while, so thought it a good opportunity to try this out again.

Booted up with 64bit Kernel and Extensions. Plugged my Western Digital USB/FW drive into the 800FW on my MBP. As before, it recognized the drive with no issues. Started a movie with vlcplayer - again, no issues. Started Activity Monitor to monitor Disk Activity. At relatively low activity (peaks of around 12MB/sec) everything works fine. Then I "duplicated" a large movie (1Gb file). Activity shot up to about 30MB/sec. After 60 seconds, I then "duplicated" another large movie (1Gb file). Almost instantly, disk activity went to 0 (Zero) and stayed there for at least 10 minutes.

Attempted to Cancel ("X") both duplications - neither responded within 5 minutes. Tried to eject drive (message "drive is in use"). Finally after 10 minutes, "Resolved" issue by forceably unplugging drive and plugging back into USB 2.0 port.

All the posts identify this issue as being a performance-related issue - ie, that if there is enough activity on the FW drive, that it will crash.

I am having similar problems with my Mac Pro (2.66 quad core) running 10.6.4

Any attempt to partition, erase or backup to external FW drives fails, followed by boot drive corruption

So now I cannot backup my OS or data drives to a third disk for offsite storage