Camera causes Firewire Drives to Disconnect

Clearly I have a camera issue, but I'm wondering if anyone out there has run into this:
When I connect my MiniDV camera (Canon Optura 200MC), external Firewire 800 drives immediately drop off the map and I get the standard error about possible data loss, etc. Also, the log and capture window in FCP causes the software to freeze up and quit 'due to inactivity.'
What causes this and is there a fix? Are my firewire ports partly to blame or is it purely the camera? I'll be running an extended hardware test later tonight to see if anything shows up.
I'm running a MacPro 2(x)2.66 GHz DualCore Intel Xeon, Mac OSX 10.5.5 and all my quicktime/Final Cut Studio apps are recently updated.
Thanks for any help,
Ben

Thank you for the replies, however, I just picked up a JVC miniDV camera and I am experiencing the same problems. In addition, I can't even get FCP to recognize the camera even by disconnecting my external drives.
This seems to be an issue with low-end consumer cameras. My DVX100 doesn't have issues connecting to FCP. I'd like to troubleshoot this...
I trashed my FCP preferences, as that seems to fix a lot of bugs over time, and no progress. Are there additional preference files I can trash safely to see if my problem is on that end?
What will happen to FCP if I trash the "Custom Settings" (Library/System Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Custom Settings). Will I lose vital settings for FCP to run or will it recreate these files on the reboot?
Any other ideas?
Thanks again.
Ben

Similar Messages

Why an I losing contact with Firewire drives and camera back?

One of my computers suddenly won't connect to a Phase One digital back via firewire.
Tried to plug in a external drive to check the port. No contact. (Tried various cables, etc.)
Tried camera on another computer. No contact. Tried firewire drives that had been running before on this same computer, and now it won't read these drives.
My PhaseOne dealer assures me that a digital back can't possible fry or disable a port. Still. there they are.
Took one of these drives to yet another computer that connects fine with yet another drive, tried the problem drive, and there was no connection. When I checked About This Mac there was a spinning wheel, as though it were looking for something.
Any thoughts, anyone? I don't want to test more drives if they are being damaged. And if they are, can they be recovered?
Many thanks
Sean Kernan

Hi, John.
1. I presume in Finder Preferences, in the General tab, you've selected "CDs, DVDs, and iPods" under "Show on desktop." Otherwise, FireWire drives won't display on the desktop, but they should still appear in the Finder's Sidebar.
2. If you did not Eject the drive before you disconnected it or powered it off, its partition map may be corrupted. That could explain the symptoms you are seeing. Your FireWire-based digital camera back may be seen as a FireWire drive.
Disconnecting a removable storage device — FireWire drive, USB drive, etc. — without first ejecting it can result in the drive's partition map being corrupted. Before disconnecting such a device, one must first Eject it by either:
- Dragging its icon to the Trash.
- Control-clicking the drive's icon and selecting Eject from its contextual menu.
- In Disk Utility, selecting the device, then selecting Eject in the Disk Utility toolbar.
If there's data on the drive you wish to recover, see my "Data Recovery" FAQ. Once you recover the data you want to save, if any, you will need to repartition and reformat the drive.
3. Before you panic w.r.t. item 2 above, Here is some general troubleshooting advice w.r.t. FireWire devices 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: Select the appropriate knowledge base item for your model of Mac from this KB search. Follow the instructions on resetting the PMU or SMU carefully!
(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.
(e) Check with the manufacturer of your FireWire drive or enclosure to see if any firware updates are available for such.(4) Hopefully, the partition map on the FireWire drive is not damaged. If it still refuses to mount, you may need to employ data recovery tools or services: see my "Data Recovery" FAQ.Note that some of the information above is from the "FireWire Problems" chapter of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X.
PS: You've not provided any info about the computer in question, i.e. Mac model, installed RAM, installed version of Mac OS X, etc. That's always important to include in a post, and I suggest you add it to your profile: click "My Settings" in the upper-right section of the sidebar on the right side of this page.
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.

Boot process hangs if external firewire drive disconnected.

I have an external firewire drive connected to my desktop at work. Time machine has been working well until someone disconnected the firewire drive. I didn't notice that it wasn't connected, but what I did notice was that the computer would hang at the grey screen during the boot process. Sometimes, I shut down the machine and then started it again, it would boot normally.
Then I noticed that the firewire drive was disconnected. Once I reconnected it, there were no longer any problems. I haven't seen any posts about this topic but I have heard from other folks at work that they have had the same experience.
So my real question is this: if I set up my MacBook Pro (which I carry back and forth to work on a daily basis) to have Time Machine back up to the Time Capsule at home, will the MacBook Pro be reluctant to boot when I'm not at home and Time Capsule is not available?

Has no problem booting when disconnected from time machine

Connecting DV camera via firewire disconnects external firewire drive

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.
I have 4 drives connected inline and it happens to any one of them, whichever I attach the firewire to.
I trashed FCP permissions, but that didn't help. I'm running FCPHD 4.5.
Any ideas?
PowerBook G4 15 Titanium Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Its the canon camera. Firewire and canon cameras apparently don't play in the same sandbox very well. All macs have only one firewire bus. For a macbook pro you can use an express card slot, but the imac's you are kinda stuck. The best course of action is to copy to hard drive and then move it within imovie. I read this in Tom Wolksy's book on FCE. It is weird. I have a Sony HDV and an older imac and i can use one firewire port for importing and go straight to an external firewire drive--no problem. However, in his book on page 56. It states the firewire issue. I know this is an imovie forum, but i can assume its also the same for imovie.

Second Firewire drive causes first to be disconnected

Having transferred a load of stuff off the main HD onto an external Firewire drive, I decided it would be prudent to have a backup schedule for the new drive as well as the main one. However, whenever I connect and power up a second Firewire drive, the first is disconnected and I get the message that it's a bad idea to disconnect drives without unmounting them first. I ended up having to connect the backup drive via the powered USB hub and watch a very slow backup take place.
If you can't run two drives off an iMac, what's the point of having two Firewire ports...? (The external drives are both powered by "bricks" so I'm surprised there's a problem.)
Is my Mac a lemon? (Cos with all the problems I've been having I'm beginning to think so!)
Would an external (powered) Firewire hub be a good idea in this case?

Have you tried daisy-chaining them? That is, plugging one drive into the other, then into the computer? In any case, a fire wirehub wouldn't be a bad idea.

Firewire drive disconnection warning

I am on a new Mac Pro with three Gtech drives daisy chained. All software is updated and current. The last couple of days I have come back and awakened the Mac to find the frightening alert about drives having been disconnected and possible data loss. I am guessing it has something to do with the sleep function. How can I avoid this automatic disconnection problem, and what causes it? The cables are also new and came with the drives, which I bought at the Apple Store.

Disconnect them before sleeping the computer. I have owned 5 macs and have 3 now and in all those years I haven't "slept" one of them as I don't understand the point of bothering since they boot up in 30 seconds.

Can firewire drives in series sometimes cause system failure?

We have had problems with a 2007 iMac (23") locking up at times. We have AppleCare, and have run numerous tests to try to elucidate the problem.
After the Apple service center here could not find any problem during several days of testing, we've been doing some testing back in our office. Here's what we seemed to have discovered:
Problems SOMETIMES seem to arise when two firewire drives are connected in series to the firewire 800 port. One is a LaCie d2 Big Disk USB 2.0 & FireWire 800 , the other is an OWC Mercury Elite Firewire 800 Pro. Our normal way of running these has been with the LaCie as the outermost of the two. We discovered that we seem to be free of problems if the order is reversed and the LaCie is off, though she can also run for (at least) a while with the LaCie on, as well.
I'm theorizing that our problems may be related to one of two things:
1) Conflict between the way the two drives, and the iMac, implement the firewire 800 standard.
2) Startup problems when the firewire drives are turned on more-or-less simultaneously. One drive could be in a state where its interface is transitioning from "pass through" (drive off) stage to the "active" (drive on) state.
My question is this: Is anyone aware of any problem like this? Is it understandable that such a problem could affect the system enough to even freeze up the system?

Sure external devices can cause issues with your Mac if it's causing some kind of hardware problem with the Firewire bus-- drawing too much power, over or under voltage etc.. Some iMacs just have problems with the FW ports themselves. Sometime resetting the SMC will fix it: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1543?viewlocale=en_US
I have two FW800 drives from OWC daisy chained and I have not had any issues at all. I would try and isolate the two drives if possible to see if the problem persists. Disconnect one of the drives for a few days and use just one drive. Then switch and connect only the other drive for a few days. Then maybe try one of them on FW800 and the other on USB. The FW400 and 800 share the same bus so it may not be any differnt testing one on each if it ends up being a power issue. I wouldn't think it's a power issue though because the external drives have their own power and should not be drawing any power from the computer. But you never know
George

Disconnecting daisychained Firewire drives

I have two MacAlly 100AC firewire drives daisychained. What is the proper way to disconnect one or both of them from my computer?

If you want to disconnect only the last one on the chain, you can Eject it and then disconnect it. And be very careful not to disconnect the first one.
If you want to disconnect the first one or both, you must Eject both before disconnecting.
After doing the software eject, it's a good idea to wait around five seconds before actually unplugging. Some users, including myself, have noticed that OS X sometimes doesn't register the eject right away, and you get the warning message about a device being removed without being dismounted even though you did it. Waiting always avoids this problem.
Eject methods:
A. File > Eject or its keyboard shortcut listed on the menu, Command-E.
B. Click the Eject button next to the drive in the Finder window sidebar.
C. Use Disk Utility to Unmount or Eject any mounted volume.
D. Drag the volume to the Trash; this changes the Trash icon to an Eject icon in OS X.
I stopped telling Mac users to "drag to the Trash to eject" as the preferred method. This holdover from OS 9 is one of the most counter-intuitive UI ideas ever to come out of Apple and caused Apple to be the subject of much ridicule. Apple got smart in OS X and added more and better ways to eject. Dragging to the Trash is also the slowest way because you have to aim it there. Command-E or the sidebar Eject button are instantaneous.

Sleeping firewire drive causes system crash

I have a 320 GB external firewire seagate drive connected to my Dual Ghz Quicksilver G4. At least twice a day, when I try to access that drive, I experience a system crash, what I believe to be a kernal panic. I get a message telling me I need to shut my computer down and restart it. I am thinking this is not so good for my computer.
So, either the hard drive is the problem or it's the third party firewire card i have installed in one of my PCI slots. But here's the thing, other drives are connected to that card.
Would keeping the Seagate drive awake stop this from happening? It goes to sleep all the time. Have others experienced problems with the seagate drives? Should I stop using it?

Hi, Aaron. Welcome to the Discussions.
If you are seeing this message, that indicates a kernel panic.
There could be a problem with the FireWire drive or the card. If disconnecting the drive for a few days results in no additional panics, then it is the drive. For that, I'd contact Seagate. If not, the card becomes suspect. An examination of the panic log might prove helpful.
You can also try running Step 1 of the process specified in my "Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption" FAQ against the Seagate FireWire drive.
Checking the FireWire cables, trying different cables or ports, checking that the card is installed correctly, checking that you assembled the Seagate drive and enclosure correctly (sounds like you built the FW drive) are some other troubleshooting steps to consider. The FireWire enclosure itself may be defective.
See also my "Resolving Kernel Panics" FAQ. This FAQ includes step-by-step instructions for identifying and resolving some of the most common causes of kernel panics, including tips like those above.
My FAQ is a roadmap: start at the beginning and work through to the end, following the instruction in the order specified, including the "If all else fails..." section if a cause or resolution is not found in an earlier troubleshooting step therein.
You maybe unable to prevent the FireWire drive from sleeping. Secondary hard drives (second internal, as well as external drives) may not respect the "Put the hard drive(s) to sleep when possible" option if de-selected. I discuss this particular issue in my "Spinning Beach Ball Of Death (SBBOD)" FAQ, specifically in the section entitled "SBBOD spins for 30-35 seconds. You may hear your hard drives spinning up."
Good luck!
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.

Random daisychained Firewire drive disconnects under Snow Leopard

OK... so I thought this was specific to my hard drives. However, we're not starting to see the problem though out the studio.
Plugging a single firewire drive into a machine running Snow Leopard has no issues. However... if you daisy-chain firewire drives then they will randomly disconnect. The connection will last 2-5 minutes tops before it just drops the drives as if someone had unplugged them.
We finally verified this on a total of three machines using various hard drives.... ensuring that we were taking specific drives out of the mix.

Next time you plug in the drive, see if it shows up in
Disk Utility. Want to see if the OS is recognizing it
and just not mounting it. If it doesn't show up there,
try the command line version by using the following
command:
diskutil list

I have a new 2.0GHz Intel Core i7 macbook pro and my external firewire drive is causing the laptop to lock up

I have a new 2.0GHz Intel Core i7 macbook pro and my external firewire drive is causing the computer to lock up. The drive seems to sleep and then never wakes and the laptop locks up. I've had this drive connected to an older 2.0 core duo macbook pro and a 3.0GHz quad core macpro with no issues. It's a ministack v3 drive, 2GBs, fw400+800, sata and usb. Any ideas? And can I stop the drive from going to sleep?
Thanks.

Check with the drive's manufacturer to see if they might have a firmware update for the enclosure; it sounds like the enclosure's firmware isn't properly detecting the FireWire wakeup sequence.
Obviously this could also be a bug with the new MBP's firmware, so it wouldn't hurt to ask the Genius Bar at your local Apple Store; in particular, ask them to show you that the sleep/wakeup sequence on your MBP works with some other FireWire drive.

Firewire drives cause kernel panic on PPC, not Intel

I'm trying to get three firewire drives to work on a PowerMac G5. Before updating to 10.4.8, they worked individually, but not chained together. Now, if you connect any one of them, the system has a kernel panic. They would cause the panic on the earlier version of 10.4 when chained together. Everything works perfectly on a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, both running 10.4.8.
Below are the notes I took on the three drives as I was troubleshooting. All three are from Maxtor.
Drive 1:
300GB
EDA EB300G0160101
Has a filesystem, but Disk Utility claims there is no partition. It mounts on an Intel Mac, but causes a kernel panic on a G5.
Filesystem is Mac OS Standard
G5 System will panic while booting if the drive is connected and turned on.
G5 panics when trying to mount drive.
Drive 2:
200GB
EDA Ay200A0260101
Has a Mac OS Extended filesystem
G5 System will panic while booting if the drive is connected and turned on.
G5 Panics when trying to mount drive.
Drive 3:
300GB
EDA BA300D0080101
Has a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) filesystem.
G5 System will panic while booting if the drive is connected and turned on.
G5 panics when trying to mount drive.
Because of the change when 10.4.8 was installed, I suspect this is a driver problem. It could also be a controller problem that just happened to get worse when the update was done.
I ran the Apple Service Diagnostic on this machine and was unable to find anything wrong since I replaced both CPUs.
Any ideas?
PowerMac G5 dual 1.8 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

If the drives were formatted on the Intel Mac then they will have a GUID partition map installed on the drive. PPC Macs will not understand the GUID partition scheme which may be the root cause of your problem. If you want to use the drives on both platforms they need to be re-partitioned using the APM partition scheme.
Also, you should not use Mac OS Standard. You should use Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)

Problems with External Seagate GoFlex Firewire Drive Disconnecting on Sleep Mode

I am Running a 2.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 24" iMac running Mac OS X 10.7.3. I run time machine to backup to an external Seagate 3TB, FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, FireWire Drive. When the Mac goes into sleep mode, the Seagate drive un-mounts. When the Mac wakes up, I get an error that the drive was not properly disconnected and the drive is no longer mounted. The only way I can get the drive to remount, is to remove power from the drive for several seconds and then reconnect it.
I have seen several people talking about this issue in various forums with many various makes and models of FireWire drives, but I see no answers to this issue from Apple. Does anyone have a resolution to this issue, or are we just stuck with this problem? It is terribly frustrating!!!! The lack of response or interest from Apple is even more frustrating!!!

Wish I had an answer, or even a clue about this one. I have a Western Digital MyBook Studio that I've had for a fair number of years now and finally had to resort to just plugging it it as a USB device. Since it's only used for Time Machine backups and storing things I rarely need, it's not a huge burden, but I'd love to hear from anyone with a suggestion as to how to fix this. I recently upgraded from a 17" late 2006 iMac to a Mid 2011 21.5" iMac and would really like to go back to FireWire if it's not going to be a big-ole-pain in the hind end.

Improperly disconnected firewire drive

my firewire got improperly disconnected, and now the computer is not recognizing it, not even in system profiler. i tried restarting, drive and computer both, plugging it on before/after it was turned on, and none of these things helped. is there anything else that i can try?
(i also put this question in the 'using mac os x tiger' forum; i wasn't exactly sure where it should go.)

See my FAQ:
http://www.macmaps.com/firewirebug2.html
In the future please don't crosspost. Someone will get to your post eventually and tell you if it needs to be posted elsewhere.

Macbook causes external firewire drive to operate constantly

I have a Macbook 1.83MHz with 2GB of RAM installed. Whenever I connect my 80GB LaCie external firewire drive, the drive commenses to do a rapid cycle as if I were copying a large file to it and does not stop for the duration of being attached to the computer. Searching through files on the hard drive is very slow, and if I click on a file in column view, the finder beachballs for several minutes while the info or preview is being generated. The drive is the only device in the chain and worked great with my previous machine, a dual 867MHz G4 mirror drive.
Any thoughts as to what might be going on? Thanks.

well, i attached my other firewire drive and it started doing the same thing, but i was able to add it to spotlight's "ignore" list and the problem went away. so this is probably the issue, but i can't make it stop on the original firewire drive because whenever i try to add it to spotlight's ignore list, the beachball spins for a few seconds then nothing shows up in the list.
checked firmware, everything up to date. next step is to reformat...
too bad spotlight doesn't default to NOT indexing everything you stick into the computer... (or at least dump indexing way back in the priority queue so it doesn't get in the way like this)

Camera causes Firewire Drives to Disconnect

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for