Unbelievable -> a FW cable fries up all my internal hard drives !
These last few days have been quite painful so I thought I should write a few words here to prevent what happened to me from happening to another G4 MDD user.
On Sunday, I inserted a cable in the second native FW port of Dual G4 1.25 MDD (2003). For information, the first FW port had been defective for almost two years now (during the warranty period but I never had the time to get it fixed). In all cases, the second FW port was working just fine until this Sunday.
When I inserted the FW cable (linking to a powered down Lacie external HD) on Sunday, my computer immediately shut down and wouldn't power up again. I thought I had fried the motherboard but, after removing as many internal components as possible, I was able to restart the G4 from the boot disc.
Eventually, I transferred the internal hard drives into a G3 B&W to see if they would be readable but one would prevent the G3 from powering up (as on the G4) and the other would play dead and not mount (it wouldn't even show in the system profiler or the system preferences panel).
Eventually, I contacted a data recovery company in California and I should get the content of the drives back soon but the bill was quite high: $ 750 / drive (I know, cheap by data recovery standards but, for a school teacher, it's still high) + the purchase of two additional external HD Lacie Drives.
My last overall backup was from earlier this year so I would have lost months of data but, now that this has happened to me, a few external LACIE drives would have allowed me to back up all of this information several times (blame unemployment until September !).
I don't know what kind of quality control the MDD G4 went through. The Audio Out Jacks (at least the front one) constantly produces a repeating buzz and now my two native Firewire ports have died (one of these deaths was obviously an expensive one).
Obviously, all of this is out of warranty (despite Apple Care as Apple is not responsible for 3rd party Hard Drives) and my only possibility now is to move ahead and reimburse that bill.
On Sunday, I inserted a cable in the second native FW port of Dual G4 1.25 MDD (2003). For information, the first FW port had been defective for almost two years now (during the warranty period but I never had the time to get it fixed). In all cases, the second FW port was working just fine until this Sunday.
When I inserted the FW cable (linking to a powered down Lacie external HD) on Sunday, my computer immediately shut down and wouldn't power up again. I thought I had fried the motherboard but, after removing as many internal components as possible, I was able to restart the G4 from the boot disc.
Eventually, I transferred the internal hard drives into a G3 B&W to see if they would be readable but one would prevent the G3 from powering up (as on the G4) and the other would play dead and not mount (it wouldn't even show in the system profiler or the system preferences panel).
Eventually, I contacted a data recovery company in California and I should get the content of the drives back soon but the bill was quite high: $ 750 / drive (I know, cheap by data recovery standards but, for a school teacher, it's still high) + the purchase of two additional external HD Lacie Drives.
My last overall backup was from earlier this year so I would have lost months of data but, now that this has happened to me, a few external LACIE drives would have allowed me to back up all of this information several times (blame unemployment until September !).
I don't know what kind of quality control the MDD G4 went through. The Audio Out Jacks (at least the front one) constantly produces a repeating buzz and now my two native Firewire ports have died (one of these deaths was obviously an expensive one).
Obviously, all of this is out of warranty (despite Apple Care as Apple is not responsible for 3rd party Hard Drives) and my only possibility now is to move ahead and reimburse that bill.
Dual G4 1.25Ghz MDD (2003), Mac OS X (10.3.9), Also owns many other Macs