Firewire issue after installing Lion

FWIIW under SL I started having FW issues a while back on my iMac4,1 (running 10.6.8 now) but this was way before that. I would plug in a FW drive and it would not mount. I discovered, accidentally, that if I put the iMac to sleep and then woke it up, the FW drive consistently mounted. Hope this helps.

@William Kucharski,

Mea culpa. I should have been more specific: Firewire doesn't work on my system. A lot of these kinds of glitches seem to be system specific. I think that's what happens when you go from beta testing to release--more people with different system/software/hardware use the OS and things like this pop up that don't affect everyone...

My Iomega drive runs via USB or Firewire 400. The Firewire 400 simply doesn't work in Lion, but if you hook it up via USB it works just fine. I can even boot from the drive hooked up via Firewire and run Snow Leopard on my CCC partition. That's why I think it is a Lion specific problem....

Same for me. Firewire 800 maxing out at about 27MBps. Very annoying.

maxc202 wrote:

Hey, I have a question too. Go to your Show System Report and under Hardware, click Firewire. Tell me what it says.

FireWire Bus

Built-in Hub

- Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec

- Connection Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec

Unknown Device

- Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec

- Connection Speed: Unknown

________________________________________________________________________________ _

Hmmmm.... Very interesting.

This is on a 2.66 Quad Mac Pro G5.

Good thing I tested first before I installed it on my other macs on which I rely heavily on FireWire.

Oh well. Guess I'll wait for the 10.7.1 update before upgrading.

Same here. Had a Drobo set up for my backups and all the other Mac machines in the house. After Lion Drobo not only collapses, but the whole Mac freezes. Have done 10x the number of hard resets during Lion as I have done on all macs together in the past 10 years. This Lion should be put to sleep.

But here's the 'remedy'.....somehow my Drobo worked during the first day of two (don't ask me how or why), so the BIG backup of some 500Gb worked OK. But since then the FW800 connection appears to kill the Mac (but only since Lion; SL worked like a charm). Tried the Drobo now on USB (since it's updates on the backup anyway) and it works smooth. Slower, but OK.

So....thanks to Apple Lion for ruining my FW800 ? Guess so.....😠

Having the same issue for days since upgrading to Lion. All my firewire drives mount except my ION Firewire 400 drive. It works over USB, however. I have a Drobo (Rev 2) which is connected to my MBP (early 2008) through FW800 and my other FW800 drives are daisey-chained through it. The only one that doesn't mount is my FW400. Getting a little annoyed.

Some of you are saying that the FW800 is slower on Lion. I think that is the case with me, but I don't know how to test this. Is there a special way?

Oh, and if I look in System Profiler under firewire I see this:

---------------

System Info:

Mac OS X v. 10.7

MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz

6MB L2 Cache

4GB DDR2 SDRAM

200GB HDD

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

May I ask what LaCie drive you have in use? Because my d2 Quadra (V3) does not work with FW800. Apparently the older V2 model does though.

Alex Kolyer wrote:

Some of you are saying that the FW800 is slower on Lion. I think that is the case with me, but I don't know how to test this. Is there a special way?

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

There's a program called XBench that runs a great variety of tests to benchmark a system. You can customize the tests though and for instance only have your disk(s) speed detected.

flofromvienna wrote:

May I ask what LaCie drive you have in use? Because my d2 Quadra (V3) does not work with FW800. Apparently the older V2 model does though.

I'm not sure how you tell which version the d2 Quadras are, but I have one on a Mac Pro, one on a MBP, both running over FW800.

The System Profiler info for the one on the Mac Pro states:

d2 quadra Unit:

Unit Software Version: 0x10483

Unit Spec ID: 0x609E

Firmware Revision: 0x110

The new version features an USB 3.0 port instead of the FW400, and the On-Off switch has no Auto position.

Must be V1 or V2 then as all my drives are used in "Auto" mode over FW800.

Thank you! It's because I'm getting my V3 replaced for a V2 by LaCie, finally! Apparently no problems with older versions of the d2 Quadra.

Which IMHO is even further proof that manufacturers know it's a non-OS issue or they wouldn't bother swapping out drive versions to solve the problem, they'd be bugging Apple to fix Lion.

I for one, have not had issue with Firewire 800 drives.

I have used G-Drive mobile drives, Iomega eGo w/FW800

drives with a 2010 Mac Mini, early 2009 24" iMac and

a 2011 13" i7 Macbook Pro.

None of them have issues and seem as fast as previously.

As a matter of fact, chose the G-drive because they are the

fastest FW800 portable drives I have used, followed by the

Iomegas.

It does seem, that some chipsets used in FW drives always

have some issue.

So I ran xbench just now on my Drobo (Rev2) connected via FW 800. Here's the result:

Can anyone interpret this for me? Thanks!

---------------

System Info:

Mac OS X v. 10.7

MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz

6MB L2 Cache

4GB DDR2 SDRAM

200GB HDD

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT