Firewire issues after Snow Leopard...

Thamks for the link, I'm seeing kernel panics and the like when accessing the external FW drive and this thread has been very useful

it not work!

Just to update here. I just bought a Western Digital "My Passport Studio" 500Gb USB/Firewire portable hard disk today (my existing external USB drive was starting to fail). I started trying to copy my files using the Firewire800 - it recognized the device, but then after copying a few Gb, the disk activity went to zero and the copies failed. I had to unplug and plug the firewire drive back in to make it visible again.

I am running the latest, patched OS-X 10.6.1 - the issue occurs whether you run 32bit or 64bit kernels.

I installed the OS/X Leopard version (10.5.8) of the kext file - and rebooted/fixed file permissions. I've already copied 200Gb across so far, and the drive seems to be working.

Obviously, this is a workaround. I'm concerned that my kext files will not be updated correctly due to their modifications when Apple finally releases an update. I've created a backup copy of the 10.6.1 kext files just in case. But its definitely a bug on Apples side.

My firewire problems were solved after a hardware/ RAM reset.

The procedure is as follows :
1. Disconnect all cables (also the power cable) except your keyboard and mouse
2. Press the start button and keep it pressed for 10 sec.
3. Connect the power cable
4. Press the start button and immediately the following for mutually keys p r+cmdalt (cmd + alt left of the spacebar) and keep them pressed
5. Keep it pressed until you have seen a second reboot
6. My firewire problems were gone after start up


Another non permanent solution is to have your firewire accessory active before you power up your MAC.

I'll hope it works for you also.

Regards,

John

Jacp I LOVE YOU!!!!

It work now!!!!

Has anyone had success with this using a HDV camera? I have an HV30 that is giving me issues, I have installed the 10.5 firewire.kext listed in this forum and PRAM reset the laptop several times, no luck.

Hello everyone,

I must say that I really tried everything besides the change of kext files. The only way this works for me is to extract with Pacifist the 5 kext files (not the IOfirewireserialbusprotocoltransport.kext alone !) from my Leopard 10.5.6 installation DVD to a random folder (desktop f.e.), without installing them from within Pacifist, and to manually copy the kext files with the Finder to the /System/Library/Extensions folder (be sure to have 5 files dated 10 december 2008), followed by a Disk Utility permissions repair and reboot. I rebooted twice and copied several times up to 10 GB from my Snow Leopard drive to my problematic Freecom firewire drives back and forth and it is really works this time !

Easy way:
1. Please find the 5 Leopard 10.5.6 IOfirewire kext files on my iDisk in a zip file: http://public.me.com/amaurymac
2. Unzip and copy the 5 files to /Systems/Library/Extensions, overwriting the 10.6.1 versions
3. Do a permissions repair with Disk Utility and reboot

Enjoy !

Amaury

Tried just IOfirewireserialbusprotocoltransport.kext
No go
Tried the 5 x IOFireWire files
No go
Tried all 6 (including FireWireStorageDeviceSpecifics.kext)
Worked

Hello Amaury and the others
thanks for the trick, this worked for me
Obviously the firewire extension as been disabled during the 10.6.1 update :
I have been surprised to see that after the update the file IOFirewireSerialBusPRotocolTransport.kext has been switched to IOFirewireSerialBusPRotocolTransport.disabled, making it a folder and revealing the content of the package.
Replacing this only file wouldn't work, but it did work when i replaced the 5 IOFirewire extensions by the original leopard ones.
cheers
herve

Does anyone know if installing these files will allow me to boot from my external cloned hard drive again?

Amaury, thank you for the trick... I've copied the 5 files, repaired the disk permissions (lot's of error messages scared me!!) reboot and now the speed is fast as before the SL installation... I was about to format everything... You gave a great help!!!
Do You know when the update that fix this issue will be released by Apple the files we've just substituted will be replaced with the new ones?

Hello,

As you may know, I'm in contact with a second line helpdesk operator from Apple's dutch technical support. He acknowledged that there seems to be a problem for some customers and that replacing the kext files may be a temporary solution, although Apple will never give any support on this, so use it at your own risk. However, once the problem is fixed by Apple, one can simply replace the Leopard versions with the SL ones and install their update.

Amaury

I've tried all the solutions listed here but none seem to work for me. Anymore headway made on this? I'm encountering this on an intel tower, quad xeon with 8 gig rams. For now I'm going to try to downgrade back to 10.6.0 as that was when my firewire drives seemed to work. Would love to see if anyone else has more ideas. Thanks!