Greetings.. I have a first-gen Dual Dual Mac Pro, that is experiencing firewire issues after the 10.6 upgrade.
I first noticed the issue when trying to copy files to a Western Digital Passport 500GB 2.5" external HD. After the Snow Leopard upgrade, the drive is virtually un-usable with frequent hangs when attempting to copy even small files. In addition, I am having an issue where my Sony Firewire external DVD-burner is not recognized after the patch. Hmmm... All is well under USB ironically (Since the Passport has both FW 800 and USB 2 connections)
Overall. I am having real firewire issues after the patch, and it was running flawlessly before the patch.
Anyone else having similar issues? The only thing I changed was my software.
Thanks in advance...
MacPro, MacBook Pro unibody, and many iPods...,
Mac OS X (10.6)
Thank you for your update. Since the problem now happens with LaCie and Freecom drives on my system it seems more likely an Apple problem. I contacted Freecom this morning and they told me to UG to 10.6.2 which was not very helpful since that stopped both drives from working. I don't think they really know what is going on.
Lets hope Apple fix this problem soon. I am not happy with having 10.5.8 kext files on 10.6.2 but I have to have backups.
As I have mentioned on several of my posts in this thread.. this is not a specific issue with any one or just a couple of vendors, it is an issue with numerous vendors and hardware. It is an issue with Apple hardware as well. My Apple firewire iPod 40gb, Sony StorStatiojn AIT drive, My WD Passport, My LaCie Bigger Disk, my Sony CDRW, and the FW bus/hub in my Cinema display. Only USB is stable and reliable for me, and unfortunately a lot of my devices are FireWire only. :-\
Just adding one more experience. I have a Mac Mini (early 2009) and a Fantom GreenDrive Quad 1TB drive. When the drive is connected over Firewire, everything seems to be going fine, but eventually my whole system has serious trouble---can't access the drive, Finder freezes, and various other things seem to just stop working. Meanwhile when I connect over USB everything seems to work fine, although Xbench confirms that drive access is slower than Firewire, when it works.
I tried many of the things mentioned in this thread, including PRAM resets and re-formatting the drive in Snow Leopard. Nothing has changed. I did not try replacing the kexts with their Leopard equivalents, however... being able to use USB makes me too lazy for that!
I will be very interested to find out more about the root problem of this in months to come. I, too, have had most of the problems listed, and tried most of the fixes. Replacing kext files worked. Then 10.6.2 stopped it working. Now, today, swapping cables made FW work again. Hot swapping seems to have got it going. What the frickin' **** is going on???? Let sleeping dogs lie. ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????
I'm adding my complain to this batch, I cannot access my time machine back, which is a SERIOUS problem. What's the point of a back up if you can't access it? I'm using a Western Digital External HD (with Firewire) and have had no problems with it before upgrading to 10.6. Now the drive will not even mount, so I can't access any old files or make any new backups. I will admit that reading these threads has been little help as I'm not looking to go and buy a new HD that will work. Apple prides itself on functionality, so I shouldn't have to buy a new HD everytime a system updates. I've had loads of problems since upgrading, and I'm considering downgrading to resolve that problems.
I have a call open with Apple and they are trying to troubleshoot the problem.
All we have managed to determine so far is that a full clean install with 10.6 and patches to 10.6.2 and my firewire drives will work correctly. However my normal system that have been upgraded from 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 will not show firewire drives or they will work really slowly unless I use files from 10.5.8.
I am awaiting feedback from apple on my latest tests. Needless to say doing a clean install is a very time consuming way to solve the problem and not something I will be doing for a little while
Here the same problem. On 10.6.2. since a week. Had iPhoto library and Time Machine on Freecom 1TB Firewire drive. First I experienced huge problems on iPhoto. Then I moved the iPhoto library to my internal drive and the problems were gone. Then I noticed backing up a couple of MB in TM would take ages. Had my Freecom 1TB reformatted but that didn't help. When I now would want to make a full backup of 130GB it would take 50 hours or so..... Finally found this thread but there seems to be no solution yet. For the time being I cannot backup.
The only work around/ solution user Amaury found. That is to get the following files from 10.5.x and use them instead of the 10.6.2 versions
FireWireStorageDeviceSpecifics.kext
IOFireWireAVC.kext
IOFireWireFamily.kext
IOFireWireIP.kext
IOFireWireSBP2.kext
IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext
First of all after replacing the files Disk Utility was not able to locate the disk anymore, because it found a problem in the extensions. Then I put the original files back and now the disk does not show up anymore in Disk Utility. Rebooting doesn't help.
So, instead of getting any better I am in deep **** now. Any suggestions that DO work ?
Hi,
Tried your solution, but ended up in horrible problems
1) After copying the files, Disk Utility was not able to access the firewire disk because it found problems in the extensions. So-----> setting permissions not possible
2) Put the original files back and rebooted
3) Now the disk is not recognized at all. Firewire is dead.
Do you have any suggestions how to recover from this ?
I am sorry the solution did not help for you. I have used this 2-3 times when I reproduced the problem for Apple and this solves it.
Did you repair permissions when you copied the original files back? This seems to have an affect.
If this does not help then I strongly recommend that you open a call with Apple since there seem to be at least 2 problems with similar symptoms. I work for a multi nation software/HW company and we often get users login calls which the community knows about but because very few people tell us the are unaware of. Some parts of Apple may still be unaware of this problem, the more people who log a call the faster we will get a fix. We also get customers reporting the same symptoms but end up making 2-3 different fixes depending on the route causes.
Again I am sorry this did not fix your problem, I hope you find another solution soon or that Apple has an answer.
My primary install is still 10.5.8 on my main drive. 10.5.8 is also on a Firewire Drive and 10.6.2 is on yet another firewire drive. The main optical drive I use is a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-115D in a firewire enclosure. I used this optical drive to install 10.6.2 on its own firewire harddrive. That worked fine. Since the install, however, 10.6.2 has been able to interact with the other firewire harddrives but NOT the firewire optical drive. This is a major annoyance and will keep us from upgrading to Snow Leopard on the primary (internal) drives of our various iMacs until the issue is resolved since this configuration of firewire drives is standard on all our computers.
I am adding myself to this thread, as I have a Freecom 1TB firewire drive exhibiting the same strangled write speed problem as others here.
All was fine in Leopard, and I used a partition for a Super Duper back up, and the remaining 800GB as a media drive for 600GB of footage for a HD video project I am working on.
After the backup to Snow Leopard, everything seemed to check out fine, all my kit was working OK, so after a few weeks without problems I overwrote the SuperDuper backup with a SL version.
I set this going overnight, with orders to sleep at the end of the backup. When I got up the next morning, I was surprised to see the backup still going, with over 100GB of 136 still to go. As this was my only backup, I had to let it run to completion which took another 24 hours or so.
When I checked the backup, it seemed fine, but would not allow me to boot, so I thought perhaps Super Duper had a glitch, but then after some checking, noticed that the Partition was Apple Partition Map. I then remembered Snow Leopard would not install on my MacBook until I had changed the Partition to GUID, so I thought this was why it would not boot, and why Super Duper was slow.
Last week I needed to get some more work done to my HD project, in Final Cut Express.
Final Cut seemed fine until I started rendering a load of transitions and effects. This took an astonishing amount of time, but I put this down to it being in full 1080i HD, and this my first HD project.
However, when it came to importing a bit more footage (converting to Apple Intermediate Codec on the way) from my AVCHD camcorder, it took hours to do just a few minutes worth, when it had done the last 600 GB faster than this 50GB piece.I thought then that something was wrong with the drive.
Running Benchtest in Drive Genius confirmed this - a write speed of 1.9MB/sec maximum. The read speed was still fine though.
As I have had drives fail before, I decided to immediately copy all of my 650GB footage off onto several other drives, splitting it into smaller chunks, intending to rebuild the folder structure on a new, replacement, drive so I could continue my edit later.
Having done this I wondered if the problems were again related to the drive not being GUID formatted, so decided to re-format the drive with a GUID partition map.
This did not help at all, and now I had erased all my footage from the drive, putting all 650GB back would take about a week, so I am now stuck. I was going to get the drive replaced as I thought it must be faulty. However, it isn't, as I have now discovered it works fine with a very old Powerbook running Tiger.
This is obviously a Snow Leopard issue, which Apple have got to sort out. They can't just mess up something as important as firewire. Video editors use this a lot, and it is one of the reasons we use Macs.
I'm now stuck with media in an unusable condition, scattered amongst several drives. I could link all the drives up, but the project would not find where it all is, and as I have put in several days of work already, I don't want to risk screwing that up as well.
Come on Apple, get this mess sorted. This is way worse than the Powerbook Echo Loop saga of a few years ago.
