Firewire issues after Snow Leopard...

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

For now, use 10.5.8 untill Firewire is fixed.

OK, this apparently applies to FW Video cameras as well. NONE of my FireWire digital cameras are now recognized after upgrading to SnoKitty, (10.6.4). Needless to say since my main job here is video production, this is a rather bad situation to be in. I do have an Iomega eGo FW800 external hard drive that works fine. Ditto with USB.

{quote:title=Sean Chandler wrote:}.... followed by boot drive corruption {quote}

Could you clarify your case of Boot Drive corruption?

I think this has happened to me on two separate Macs. Up till now I've been suspecting the the problem was caused by running a SilverKeeper backup.

In both cases, the backup completed as normal, but in the hours following it I noticed that the Mac became more and more unresponsive. Then the weirdness started... first the Date and Time settings reset themselves... the network connections were dropping and so on and so forth.

Upon restart (on the first Mac), I could not get past the blue screen. I ran Disk Utility which said the boot volume was OK - clearly it wasn't. In the end I had do a PRAM reset to fix the various hardware issues followed by a complete format and install.

On the second Mac, a similar thing occurred (again immediately after a Silverkeeper backup) - the Mac started bogging down until the hardware went loopy - clock resets dropped connections etc.

Again, there seemed to be damage of some kind to the boot volume as when I rebooted this machine, I could not get any preferences to 'stick' - e.g. Date and Time, Network and App prefs. So, on this Mac to, I had to do a PRAM reset and a format and restore.

The reason I suspect Silverkeeper is that lately, I've noticed that the 'Ignore Permissions On This Volume' box refuses to stay ticked on external drive I have been backing up to. I deleted the /var/db/volinfo.database file to make this preference stick, but as soon as SilverKeeper would launch, it became unticked and refused to be set back. (I was not creating a bootable volume, just a file to file copy of selected folders).

I wonder if, in my case, there has been some kind of perfect storm with a bug in SilverKeeper and the issues reported in this forum.

Just for the sake of clarity, I should add that once I re-installed everything (not including Silverkeeper of course!) I copied my large (800GB) iTunes library to the external Firewire drive and the copy worked flawlessly.

Anyone else here using SilverKeeper?

Apart from Sean Chandler (above), has anyone else encountered boot drive corruption with this Firewire issue. Most of the posts in this topic seem to detail intermittent connectivity, unstable connections and slow read/write to the external device.

Has anyone else had an external Firewire drive error that causes the Mac's internal boot drive to be corrupted?

I'm trying to ascertain for certain whether two recent system failures were caused by a Firewire bug or by SilverKeeper...

If there's a Firewire problem that causes this, it seems that it might be hard to pinpoint the exact circumstances that cause it - though large data transfers could trigger it.

Thanks for your input.

Fwiw, I just switched to 10.6.4 from 10.5.8, no issues so far.

I'm using several external FW drives, 400 and 800, 2.5" and 3.5", even a Newertech docking station .

Did several SuperDuper backups, TM backups, large file transfers etc. from and to FW HDDs, installed the system via FW .

Oh, and I'm not using any enclosures with modified chips, apart from some ancient Iomega POS 😉 , but no LaCie, WD or Seagate FW enclosures (but Lacie portables, those are solid) .

Also, I always repartition and format every new drive, and get rid of any little helper apps the drives might be soiled with .

Thanon, thanks for the reply. I'm using LaCie 1TB triple interface (FW 400 / USB / eSATA) drives which have been solid for at least a year and I've had no prior issues. I'm certainly still inclined to think that the two major crashes I've had in the last two weeks were down to SilverKeeper and not the drives and I think these FireWire issues are just worrying me unnecessarily. Like you, before I use any new drive I always reformat with GUID partition Table and HFS+ and I never install any of the laughingly called 'helper' applications. I only used SilverKeeper in its file-to-file copy mode and NEVER to created any kind of bootable volume, yet it still insisted on messing with the external drives permissions.

The thing I can't seem to find out is whether it is possible that an external FireWire drive could cause such a disaster to my Mac's internal boot volume. Especially given that most of the posts in this topic are about general reliability issues with very few mentions of any kind of actual crash.

I Googled my drive and discovered that it uses a Oxford 934 chipset, which I understand to be of decent quality, so I'm more confused than ever...

Once I had major issues with my Newertech FW docking station, which resulted in the whole system going bonkers several times.

It turned out the inserted HDDs didn't make proper contact inside the docking station, and messed up the computer, not just the attached drives and Firewire bus.

thanon wrote:
Once I had major issues with my Newertech FW docking station, which resulted in the whole system going bonkers several times.

Did that problem actually cause corruption to the boot volume? Or did the problem go away as soon as the FW device was disconnected?

In my particular case, once that problem occurred I was unable to boot the Mac whether any devices were connected to it or not.

I think to be safe, I'll stick with using my drives via the USB interface for the time being until I can save up for a really good quality one. Do you have any recommendations for very high quality, reliable Firewire drives that might be available in the UK? Mine are currently LaCie drives, which many people say are good, but then again, many people say they are bad... 😟

I don't know what to do for the best

Well, define corruption .
It took a couple of restarts and repairs to get my system up again, but nothing major .

In the UK, there used to be a Macpower distributor , fairly well made FW enclosures, which is now called inxtron I think.
Basically a simple enclosure, with an Oxford chip that hasn't been tampered with.

g-technology.com always worked for me, too.

SO I actually just read every post in this thread. Whoowhee
I got no firewire with my macbook with 10.6.4...
actually I do have VERY occasional firewire, on external drives but they are fairly unusable...crash freeze, only recognized about one in 20 tries etc.
My firewire audio interfaces are a no go too. That is BAD
so I cant go back to 10.5.8 cuz I got this old macbook with 10.6.4 on it. It runs great and i love it except for no firewire. There is a guy named "mac mini" who posts here offering ktext strings etc, but you cant get into his idisk without the password. I would like to try that extension fix, but have no access to the five extensions since i dont have a leopard disk. I do have a torrent download of the leopard disk that may be a source. It wont install but it may have the extensions. It seems like it would be fairly easy to just post them here but there must be some rule against it or something.

Anybody care to offer my advice?
I have done everything except the extension thing
thanks
DOug M

so in 10.6.4 I just ran the kext utility from insane mac, and I do believe it may have been the trick for me.
I ran my audio interface for three hours with no hangs, and all my drives seem to show right up in the finder etc, just like with tiger and leopard.

Hopefully it's not an intermitent thing and this will keep going like this

thanks to whoever pointed to insane mac and the kext utility!
doug m

whoops i am WAY to optiistic.
It is very much better, but still flaky. Right after my positive post above, it all crashed again. Now it works again ....for how long?

AT least i think my hardware is fine now:)

still interested in the kext extension transplant from 10.5.8....anyone?

thanks in advance:)

doug m

Hello,

The access to my iDisk public folder has been reactivated: https://public.me.com/amaurymac/.
If applicable, please consider changing the firewire daisy chain connection order, although this shouldn't be the issue here.
In general, you should also check the length and integrity of your firewire cables.
Personally, my firewire problem was solved from 10.6.3 on, being a kext problem for the built-in chipset of my external firewire based Freecom drives.
Please post any other question you may have on this issue. I will try to answer them, based on my own experience.

Regards,

Amaury (Mac Mini 2008)

thanks mini
so could it be that running the kExt utility fixed my problem? It seems to have fixed very well the firewire audio interface (motu 896) as well as my iomega drives. I still have a flaky drive by acomdata, but i dont really need it. It's pretty old. As lomg as my audio machine runs under logic studio 9 and i have firewire storage i'm happy. I ran it all day today with a drive daisy chained to it, and it was fabulous. I turned it on and off about a dozen times today and it always jumped right into the groove like it should.
Thanks mr mac mini:)
i never did do the 10.5.8 transplant thing, just ran kext utility
Doug M