Acomdata External Firewire Drive Problem?

Just purchased a new Acomdata E5 320 GB Firewire external hard drive.
Drive will simply will not mount onto desktop. Checked connections, turned on/off, unplugged cables, etc. Nothing has worked so far.
I ran System Profiler and it states "Unknown Device" on Firewire.
I'm relatively new to Mac OS X, having converted from years of Windows, so I'm looking for suggestions / solutions to get this drive to mount properly.
Thanks....RF
Imac Intel Core 2 Duo Mac OS X (10.4.9) 2GB Ram

Thanks.
Unfortunately, Disk Utility does not see / recognize the drive.
I am awaiting a reply from Acomdata Technical Support, but it does not sound very hopeful.
Bought this from a Compusa store closing, so not certain that I can return it to the store. I will try though.
I will see if I can get it to work with Windows (and then perhaps I can sell it on eBay!!??)
Imac Intel Core 2 Duo Mac OS X (10.4.9) 2GB Ram
Imac Intel Core 2 Duo Mac OS X (10.4.9) 2GB Ram

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External Firewire Drive Problems

I have a firewire drive that all of a sudden stopped appearing on my desktop when I booted up each day ... BUT, after about an hour or so if I shut down, turned off the the FW drive, turned the drive back on and re-booted the FW drive appears. Hmmmm? When I would run disk repair on the drive in question the report came back "Drive Ok - No Repairs Necessary". THEN - when I started copying from the FW drive ./ moving files on it after a few days it started to hang up the computer. Next, re-running Disk Repair turned up "Invalid Node." I succesfully rebuilt the FW disk with Disk Warrior last night rebooted and ran disk repair on the FW drive and all was well. Shut everything down and called it a night. Today my computer will not see the FW drive, it doesn't show up in the Finder, Disk Uttility or even in System Profiler where under "firewire" it lists "unknow device."
Ok, any ideas anyone. Thanks much.

I have six 300gig Seagate hard drives chained together that all worked fine with Tiger on my MacBook Pro. All drives have been fully reformatted to Mac format and I do not use any One-Touch software.
As soon as I upgraded to Leopard, I found that I could only mount 2 of these drives at a time. If I attempted to mount a third drive (in ANY order of startup or wiring configuration) either that drive doesn't mount, the System locks up... or both, usually. The only way out is to hold the Power button to kill the computer
I have tried everything. I've repaired every drive with Disk Utility AND with Disk Warrior. I've tried every wiring order, but the results are the same. I restarted with a clone of my former (pre-Leopard) Tiger drive, and all the Seagate drives worked fine, but as soon as I restarted with Leopard, the same problem occurred. I've started up in "Safe" mode - same problem. The computer works fine when not connected to Firewire; and it seems to work fine with only one or two WD drives connected; but the minute I connect too many drives (any drive, any order of wiring, different Firewire cables, etc) everything freezes again.
After all the usual troubleshooting with Apple, the only thing they had left to suggest was an Archive and Install of Leopard which I've done, but the problem still persists.
An Apple product specialist is investigating this problem in depth; but since all my drives are Seagate, I'm wondering if anyone has gotten any feedback about specific Seagate problems with Leopard.
THE PROBLEM ALSO OCCURS WHEN RUNNING DISK UTILITY FROM THE LEOPARD INSTALL DISK - ONLY 3 OF THE SIX DRIVES WILL MOUNT AT ANY ONE TIME, The order of connection makes no difference. This seems to be a Leopard problem, but I'm wondering if it's also specific to just Seagate drives.
Anyone got any ideas?

I just added two external firewire drives and they keep going to sleep. I did not have this problem when USB. I have turned off "put disks to sleep" in power preference.

I just added two external firewire drives and they keep going to sleep. I did not have this problem when using USB external drives. I have turned off "put disks to sleep" in power preference.

It is not clear if these are the same drives, just connected
differently, or different drives?
One thing that may be happening is that the drives firmware
itself is putting it to sleep when inactive. Many drives on
the market have ths feature and it is turned on by default
and require a drive utility from the manufacturer to disable it.

External Firewire Drives Don't Mount.... i need a guru.

Warning!!!!!
i'm going to ramble....
2 much sake .. heh heh
i just got a brand butt spanking new iBook G4 14" 1.42 GHz
Tiger pre-installed.
I ran Software Update. As you can tell by my info, i'm at 10.4.2 now.
In a minute i'll tell ya how i got BACK to 10.4.2 from 10.4.5
When i got my iBook I didn't plug my external firewire drives in until (about 2 days) after my update. So when i did get around to building my iTunes library, well, no luck.
My firewire drives would and do NOT mount!
By the way these particular peripherals are Western Digital firewire
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?p_faqid=694&pcreated=1036793224
and AcomData Combo USB 2.0/Firewire
http://www.acomdata.com/hdp/fs.html
drives.
With a little exploration you'll find (at least i did) that they do not have firmware or driver updates for Mac. ( if you find them i'll give ya praise!)
The AcomData drive mounts with USB but not with firewire. The thing that
creeps me out is that my 3rd Gen firewire enabled iPod mounts right up no prob!
Another thing that ties me in knots is that these drives WILL MOUNT on my iBook12" running 10.3.9, as well as my old 5cH00L iMac DV 10.3.9!!!!
I thought it might be the Update so i did a clean install with the dvd provided by Apple and now i'm back to 10.4.2 but still no luck.
I've tried repairing permissions, starting, restarting, rebooting, plugging, unplugging, Updating, Downgrading, standing on my bloody head, looking all over the dotcom.
i swear i did all this with my peripherals unplugged.
i caught wind that though these companies may not provide updates for Mac, if i were to find out the companies that make the "chipsets?" within these drives that i might have luck.
i can't figure out what kind of "chipsets" (Oxford?) are in these drives or what to do if i knew anyway!
exhale
i still believe i have the best machine on the planet right now but .......
i need a guru.
help.
much obliged,
Clive
 G4 iBooks. iMac DV (graphite). gen 2,3,5 iPods Linux on the Pod too! Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Hi, Clive.
Here is some general troubleshooting advice that may help:
(1) Review the AppleCare Knowledge Base document "What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire device".
(2) If this problem occurred after installing a recent Mac OS X Update, and you are also unable to mount CDs, DVDs, or disk images perform the steps in this Mac OS X Hints article.
(3) The following additional steps will often help resolve problems with FireWire devices, particularly hard drives:(a) Power-on the FireWire drive before starting up (booting) your Mac.
(b) Reset PRAM and NVRAM.
(c) Reset the PMU or SMU: In the case of your iBook, I believe the article you want is "Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)." You can also check the manual that came with your new iBook.
(d) Try a different FireWire port. James Wiebe, CEO of WiebeTech, has published FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices, a white paper providing backgroud information and technical analysis concerning the causes of failure for FireWire ports. This may provide additional diagnostic information.Note that some of the information above is from the "FireWire Problems" chapter of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X.
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

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Create an ISO (Encore) or folder on your hard drive (Encore or Premiere Elements) and then use the FREE http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download to write files or folders or ISO to disc for DVD or BluRay (send the author a PayPal donation if you like his program)
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External Firewire drive does not mount on desktop now.

Greetings everyone.
G5 dual, 4.6GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, external firewire drive, formerly worked fine, now is invisible.
Not the drive. New purchase, worked fine until a restart. Not the cable. Power is getting from the G5 to the firewire drive. Not the port. I also have a firewire card instlaled so I have three ports to connect it to (and two on the FW drive). No combination works. Not the computer, the FW drive also fails to appear on an iBook. Not the OS. I did a clean install to make sure.
I'm not a newbie. I know what I'm doing. Until now! DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius and Apple's Disk Utility cannot see the drive.
The FW drive is a Powerbook internal HD inserted into a case, purchased seperately.
At my wits' end. Can anyone help please.

I am suddenly having this EXACT problem. I have two Firelite firewire drives (one 60G and one 80G) that are suddenly refusing to mount on my older dual 1.25GHz G4 tower. They are also suddenly refusing to mount on my non-intel iMac. They will both mount painlessly on my new Intel MacBook Pro, but that's not much use, since the point of the firewire drives is to transfer files between these computers. I'm updating all of them to 10.4.10 to see if that's the issue...

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I have a family pack of 10.5 and installed it just fine on my macbook. But, I'm having trouble getting my imac DVD player to read the DVD. It just spins and spits it out, and spins and spits it out. The imac is not covered under applecare so spending money to get the DVD drive fixed (which I barely use) is not something I want to do right now.
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Okay I finally got around to creating the bootable disk image of 10.5 using Carbon Copy Cloner. Still my iMac is not booting from the firewire drive!
Here's a recap of everything I've tried. I'm at a complete loss now!
- I partitioned the HD into 2 partitions-- a 10gig one for the 10.5 install, the then the rest for Time Machine. I make the partition in Disk Utility on my MacBook.
- I've partitioned the drive a few times-- always partitioning it in APM format (b/c it needs to boot my non-intel iMac).
- I've created the disk image using "restore" in disk utility. I've again tried this a few times.
- I am able to boot my MacBook from the disk image I create! So I know the FW drive is able to be used to boot from!
- Here's what I've tried in terms of getting the iMac to boot from the FW drive. It always just boots to my internal drive instead. Sometimes I briefly see a folder and question mark. I've tried all 3 FW ports. I've selected the install partition at start up in preferences. I've also held down the option key at start up (only my internal drive shows) and I've held down command-option-shift-delete and again I get the question mark and it boots to my internal drive.
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All of a sudden this has started happening.
When i connect my video camera via firewire to my external Lacie harddrive, and turn the camera on, the drive I have it connected to goes off line. A window come up saying 'Device Removal'. When I disconnect the camera, the drive comes back online.
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External Firewire Drive not Mounting

Hi, I've been searching these forums but can't find an aswer to my question. I just got a new 27" iMac, and purchased a Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter. I have 3 external Firewire drives, two of which are DC powered (the third, I understand, might be a lost cause, as it's bus powered, and I gather the bus power from TB won't power Firewire drives). At any rate, I'm not seeing either of the DC powered drives showing up, which is a big concern as I have about 5TB of stuff on them!
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External Firewire Drives Not Working...huh!?!?!?

last night, everything was fine...
this morning, my two external firewire drives don't work. one is an acomdata, and the other is a western digital. neither drive will mount on any of my four macs (powerbook g4, two powermac g4s, and an ibook g3).
like i said, last night both drives worked fine...today (just a few hours later), neither of them work. any ideas?

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Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Yes, I have seen this twice now. It has happened to two of my external VFAT drives when used on the firewire port. The drives are in BYTECC firewire/usb chassis that use this Prolific device: 067b:3507 Prolific Technology, Inc.
The drives mount fine once, but on dismount OS X trashes the VFAT boot sector. The drive will not remount on OS X after this happens. I have one mounted now in Linux, apparently on the backup copy of the partition table. The primary is completely blown away.
The signature looks like this:
from sector offset 0 on the disk:
0x00000000 45 52 02 00 1d 38 63 80 | 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
and all zeros down to 0x200.
At 0x00000230 the ASCII string "Applepartitionmap" pops up.
I don't see why this would be a vendor's driver problem.
It's just another silly OS X firewire trick. Firewire has been a nightmare on my iMac G5, and it just keeps getting better.
This happened once at 10.4.4 and again at 10.4.5, so falling back probably won't be worth it...
Apple, have you tried regression testing the firewire disk drives? It's really uncool to detroy our data like this.
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External Firewire drive not Mounting/Appearing!

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Message was edited by: slverice

I had this problem too with my G5 (PPC) and brand new Mac Book.
Both of my computers were given the same local subnet address. To change this go to System Preferences > Sharing > Computer Name, you'll see an "Edit" button, click on it and change the name or add a "2" to the end of the name before ".local"
I guess what is happening is both computers are using the same local subnet and your macbook isn't being recognized.
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My first attempt to install brought up a blue screen after the installation restart. I left it there for about 30 minutes then powered off the PowerBook by holding down the power button. I started it again and held down the option key, picked the install disk as startup, went through the disk utility repair disk (found no problems). After that I picked the new install on the external from the startup preferences and it simply restarted to a blue screen. I left that one for about 20 minutes then powered down.
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Joe-
Is the drive partitioned to APM? (Sorry I took Anton's reply to be yours.) What was the type fo partitioning onthe disk with the success? I am not knowledgable enough in those error messages on the system.log file, but one thought is - after the memory upgrade, did you clear the PRAM (long shot, but do it anyway)? The machine booting on one external Firewire drive (#2) implies the problem is with the external FW disk (#1) you are using. Some other people had the bus error, but with Time Machine. (Not to go on a tangent, but TM seems to have problems when the disk name has non-alphanumeric in it.)
Hoping someone who knows the syslog errors and the boot sequence will pipe in here.

Acomdata External Firewire Drive Problem?

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