HELP! firewire quit working today

[viaspiaggia]

hi all.

today i was just checking email, i think turbo tax was on in the background, nothing out of the ordinary. something caused a total system freeze, spinning beach ball. so i powered down, and when i came back up all my firewire drives are missing.

after much cable swapping, trying different ports, resetting PRAM etc, i got my first two drives to mount. then when mounting a third, the OS reported that a device was incorrectly disconnected, there may be trouble, etc. this happened twice, but NOW i can't get any drive to show up no matter what combination of cables, ports, and drives i use.

please help!

i was going to do a 10.4.11 upgrade at some point, perhaps i'll do that now so i have a (somewhat) fresh OS, but any other advice is much appreciated!

adam

[johnnyv]

Adam, there is a *possibility* that your firewire circuit is dead. If so, you won't be a happy camper...involves replacing a main motherboard and costs a few hundred. It's not terribly uncommon, I'm afraid.

Have you repaired your disk permissions using Hard Disk Utility?

[peterle]

a problem like this (firewire hardware error on my old G4)
destroyed the firewire-controllers on few external HD`s i own.
If you want to try again be carefull and better use always the same
hd and double check (if possible) on an other computer if the external
hd`s are still ok.

regards

[Mark Dann]

Try this:

Resetting PRAM and NVRAM
1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

Also, if that doesn't work:

Open Firmware Commands
-Start the computer and immediately hold down Command-Option-O-F
-When the computer starts it should open into a prompt screen (Open Firmware).
-Hit Return, you will see OK.
-Type reset-NVRAM this is case sensitive; include the dash, here and below.
-Hit Return
-Type set-defaults
-Hit Return
-Type reset-all
-Hit Return
The system should restart. If not, try typing exit or "shut-down" (take out the quotes), or you can manually restart the system.

If your firewire port is truly dead, then you can buy a firewire pci card, assuming you have a slot free. Replacing the logic board is generally too expensive...

[viaspiaggia]

thanks for the thoughts.

forgot to mention, its a macpro, running 10.4.9. which incidentally means you can't boot to open firmware...

permissions repaired, pram and nvram zapped, left the machine unplugged to "reset the firewire bus."

discs seem ok, they mount to my machine via usb, and with a quick test at least one of the drives mounted via firewire to my wife's laptop.

so i guess i'm off to pick up a firewire pci card.

but first, is there any way to 100% verify that the firewire bus is dead? can't locate the discs that came with my machine right now, unfortunately, so i can't run apple hardware test. any other way to verify it? any recommendations on firewire pci cards?

thanks

adam

[Michael James]

Originally Posted by viaspiaggia

something caused a total system freeze, spinning beach ball. so i powered down, and when i came back up all my firewire drives are missing.

I've seen this behavior on PT 8.0cs2. The trick to get the FW drives to show up in Disk Utility is to power down the FW drives, wait a few seconds, then power up. They should appear in Disk Utility... mount them from there.

[viaspiaggia]

thanks michael - with the right (but still mysterious) combination of reboots, plugging and unplugging, and having disk utility open, i can get my two main drives to load.

HOWEVER any third drive (i've tried a few) causes the "the device you removed was not properly etc...." and all drives disappear. so unless someone has a brilliant theory about what that means, looks like i'll be buying a pci card today.

incidentally this firewire crash would explain my system's general flakiness and proclivity to kernel panics over the last week or two. perhaps the firewire bus was just slowly dying.

currently backing up live projects via usb so i can keep working!

any opinions on whether or not doing the 10.4.11 combo upgrade will help iron this out, or make it worse?

thanks as always!

adam

[TVPostSound]

A trick that worked many times for me was to hook up another Mac FW port to FW port, and boot both computers simultaneously. While pressing the T key on the good computer. The power from the firewire port on the good computer would somehow kick start the FW port on the computer with the bad port.

This worked on my G4 MDDs. Have never had issues on any other MAC.

[Keybeeetsss]

Dude ur gonna have to get something to try & recover that or u may can get it to come up on a PC, back it up & re-format...otherwise u might be 'thu-otis'!!!

[drenkrom]

Originally Posted by viaspiaggia

incidentally this firewire crash would explain my system's general flakiness and proclivity to kernel panics over the last week or two. perhaps the firewire bus was just slowly dying.

Wait up, Adam! You were having other problems including kernel panics before the FW buss thingie? You may be looking at things backwards. The FW buss dying wouldn't normally cause kernel panics. You'd just lose your drives or not be able to mount them. It may well be that both problems are symptoms of your MoBo being on its last lap. Unfortunately, motherboard issues are the hardest to nail down, especially over a forum.

I'd recommend you go for the FW PCI card, but keep an eye on that system, as your troubles may not be over yet.

IHIW ("I Hope I'm Wrong" for those of you not keeping up with the abreviations.)