Odd FireWire problem
im am thinking this problem is something that will require terminal to fix, so I am asking it here. If this isn't the best place to ask please advise where would be.
i Have a early 2009 iMac running the latest and fully updated OSX. I recently swapped out a FireWire external hard drive to get some info off of it. When I hooked the original hard drive back up, neither it, nor another hard drive on the Firewire bus would mount. System profiler sees the drives, but not the volumes on them. Disk Utility doesn't see them at all. If I restart the computer with the drives hooked up it gets to the progress bar on the Apple Logo screen and never gets past that. The progress bar proceeded about 60% normally, then slows to a major crawl. It takes about 15 minutes to proceed from there to the end, but hangs at the end forever, it never progresses to the login screen. I've tried a lot of different things, reset the SMC, PRAM, and even reinstalled the OS by booting to the recovery volume. Interestingly I installed El Capitan on an external USB drive, which starts the computer fine and mounts the FireWire drives without any issues. From there I ran disk utility on them and everything seems fine, but they still hang the computer on startup from my usual hard drive. Since everything works fine with booting from another install of the OS on an external drive I assume that fully rules out any hardware issue. But I have no idea where to start to resolve this with my usual OS and disk. Any help would be greatly appreciated. (And no, I won't do a clean install, I have too much stuff. I'd rather start fresh from a new 27inch Retina if that's the case)
