Strange Firewire Problem (please help!)

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Level 1

34 points

Strange Firewire Problem (please help!)

I had two external firewire hard drives that worked fine but were full up on space, and so I bought another, a WD MyBook Premium, which has firewire/usb connectivity (in theory).

Again, the two older drives (a Lacie and a Maxtor) were working fine, daisy chained.

I attach the new MyBook and format it OS Journaled, and... my firewire devices all stop being recognized. In other words, I can attach any of the three devices to my computer via firewire and they won't show up on my desktop, nor be detected by diskwarrior or disk utility.

However, the two that have USB connectivity (Maxtor and MyBook) show up when connected via USB.

My firewire port is working, I connected another device to it and it was recognized.

But the firewire drives are not working on other computers either.

I am reformatting the MyBook in MS-DOS right now... hoping that will do something. I have zapped and restarted and tried a lot of crazy tricks...

At this point:

What happened?

Is there anything I can do?

I'll take any input...

Also, if my firewire LaCie is disabled by this strange happening... is there any way for me to retrieve the (priceless) data that is on it?

Thank You Very Much

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Apr 27, 2007 7:47 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Michael Tirta

Level 5

7,650 points

Apr 27, 2007 8:13 PM in response to Catnip Toy

Hi Catnip.

When you format mybook, are you hook it by itself or you daisy chain it with other two?

my guess is that there is a voltage current overload that might crippled the Firewire chips on those device.

On your macbook, try to reset your PRAM and PMU to refresh your firewire port.

Do you have another mac? If you do, try to connect Lacie and other two (one by one) and see if they able to mount.

If the firewire port really toast as I guess, you can repair it to their respective support center (I did claim for my Lacie DVD burner, and they fixed it real good), but they might not responsible with your data.

Or you can open Lacie enclosure and swap it to maxtor enclosure, connect it using usb port and back up everything from there.

ps: check jumper setting on maxtor hd, and change the one from lacie if it is differ (if those HD are SATA, then you don't have to worry).

Good Luck.

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Answer 2

Apr 27, 2007 8:24 PM in response to Michael Tirta

I have just purchased the same drive (WD, My Book premium, 250 gig) and when connected via firewire it does no mount. If I connect via USB 2.0 in mounts very quickly. My 4th Gen ipod connects through the firewire port so I know it is functioning.

I have searched both the Western Digital and Mac forums for help to no avail. The only reason I bought the premium over the essential versions of this drive was for the firewire connection.

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