PCI Firewire card OK?

[Submersible]

I've got a little more troubleshooting to do, but the onboard firewire ports on my G4 appear to be crapping out. Is a PCI firewire card an acceptable solution or am I doomed to replace the logic board on my already obsolete Mac? Any recommendations on a particular card?

[Mark Wheaton]

I tried this on my G4 and every drive connected to it got corrupted.

[theom]

http://www.digidesign.com/compato/osx/hd/fwcards.cfm


That's the one for HD not sure about le

[Iain Graham]

The top port of the 2 on our G4 MDD crapped out about 2 weeks ago. Took me a couple fo days to figure out what was wrong. I think the pins have either snapped, or more likely, the solder holding the ports to the mother board has gone south. Haven't had a chance to check this out though.

I had a single 867 G4 of my own, and a smiliar thing happened to the ethernet port. I just got a tech friend of mine to get access to the under-side of the motherboard and re-solder it. Worked like a charm afterwards. I'm hoping it's the same for our firewire ports.

If you try a PCI card, can you let me know how you get on?

Cheers,

Iain

[Submersible]

If a clean OS reinstall doesn't solve my problems, then I have little to lose by trying one of the qualified PCI cards. I'll report back with my results.

I've swapped out drives, cases, and cables. I've run Disk Repair, Disk Warrior, and reinstalled Pro Tools. I've described the symptoms on the Apple storage forum, and apparently dying firewire ports are a common hardware failure in certain G4s.