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.

Similar Messages

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

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.

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

Snow Leopard and external firewire drives

When is Apple going to acknowledge the problems with external drive access created by Snow Leopard?

Quite correct. I should not expect Apple to answer the question here. And who knows maybe they are actually working on a solution.
Since you made a kindly offer I will describe the problem in more detail.
Since upgrading to SL I have had constant problems with my firewire external drive. Unfortunately that was the drive with my Time Machine backups. The symptoms of the problems revolve around startup and recognition of the drive. The drive appears in the list but will not open, Time Machine attempted to initiate backup and just spun. I discovered that it was necessary to completely shut down my Imac, disconnect the firewire drive and power it down. I have tried leaving the drive connected and powered, sometimes the Imac sees the drive sometimes not. I have tried leaving the drive connected but powering it down, powering it up and starting the Imac sometimes it sees the drive sometimes not but more frequently than when I leave it connected. The most reliable way to reconnect to the drive is to shut down the Imac, disconnect and powerdown the drive, startup the mac, login, repower the drive and reconnect.
In the course of trying to find a solution I have tried both Disk Utility use and Tech Tool Pro. Both programs are unable to correct the problem, most frequently displaying the message "unable to unmount drive". However after the above mentioned repower sequence running either Disk Utility or TechTools Pro describes the drive as OK.
In the course of all of this I decided to wipe the drive and reformat. I was unable to remove the Time Machine files to another drive so I made the decision to abandon the backups since I made additional manual backups of the critical files and I have all my install disks.
I reformated the drive but I have not started Time Machine again. Time machine has not worked once successfully since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. And further it is clear that the same problems exist on the reformatted drive. At this point probably the best solution is to abandon SL until it leaves beta stage (if ever) and return to 10.5. Had I made that decision earlier I might (emphasize might) have been able to restore from Time Machine. Now the only option is a fully manual restore back to 10.5.
I would like to emphasize that I operate and have operated my Macs as absolutely "box stock" with no system tweeks or any third party tools. The majority of my software on this machine is Apple both Works and Life. I have MacLinkPlus Quicken, Stuffit, Bento, Data Desk, Photoshop elements, Firefox browser, Flip 4 Mac and DivX as the only third party software.

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.

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

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.

Can't properly open fcp6 project on firewire drive on another computer

I have a long and complex fcp6 project that I have been editing with fcp6 on my piwermac g5 quad running leopard. The media and render files are each split between my boot drive and a second internal drive. I copy both drives onto a partitioned FireWire drive and then plug it into my macpro 3.1. The names on the FireWire partitions are exactly the same as the powermac drive names. The project opens perfectly on the 8 core macpro from the FireWire drive and I am able to render and other things much faster . However, I am about to outgrow the 1TB FireWire drive, so I got a larger one. I duped both partitions onto the similarly partitioned and identically named new bigger firewire drive....but when I go to open the project half the media filess are disconnected and even after I manually reconnect all kinds of error messages come up and the project is totally unworkable. So, why does the first firewiure drive work perfect but not the cloned nee FireWire drive? I even put an extra internal drive in the macpro and cloned the original FireWire to it but it does the same thing as the new FireWire, totally unworkable. I don't understand why things work perfectly with first FireWire but not with any other internal or external drive. Any help would be tremendously appreciated.

The original fiteewire which does open on the mac pro was partitioned apple partition map. The new FireWire drive that doesn't open properly is also apm, but I've erased and partitioned i GUID. I've tried using both disk utilities and superduper for the cloning in the past. I'm doing the cloning onto the guid partitions right now and will let you know if it helps in the morning. At any rate I appreciate your help.

Firewire drive no longer recognized after upgrade?

having an onset of problems the last 2 weeks.
first upgraded to 10.4.6 on mac mini 1.42 non-duo, worked a few days than acted weird with apps crashing. had to reinstall from 10.4 disk. seemed ok. repaired permissions, ect. after reinstall (and a subsequent power outage) a firewire drive attached at time was no longer recognized by mac mini or connected imacG3. reinstalled 10.4.2 on mac mini. installer unable to reinstall 10.4.6., I would like to have firewire drive recognized again. when attached to other firewire drive in daisy chain, says device unrecognized, other wise unable to get any info on drive. what to do?

I am having nearly the exact same issue as you are experiencing. My Western Digital Dual-Option Media Center 160 GB FW HD is going in and out big time. It seems to be there for a time but then conks out. I have to disconnect the power and now the drive seems to be malfunctioning.
Same story with my LaCie 52x CD Burner. I placed the Disk Warrior CD in there and the computer recognized the disc at first but then spinning beach balls galore!
This has to be one of the worst updates to an OS X system I can remember. I can only think PowerPC QA testing has gone through the toilet since the Intel move was completed.

Firewire drive E01G300

After doing my research I have settled down on a firewire drive E01G300.
It costs about $250 so I wanted to know your opinion with this product before making the final sale.
I contacted maxtor and they said that this product should be able to do multiple logins and is based on OxFord 911 chipset.
http://www.newegg.com/product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144365&CMP=OTC-Froogle&ATT=Maxtor+OneTouch+II+E01G300+300GB+7200+RPM+External+Hard+Drive
Any thoughts on this will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Gopal

Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work!
First, you should always Repair Permissions in Disk Utility before and after any update; I would do that now. If you installed your update with FireWire plugged in, your Mac may not recognize it anymore.
Try resetting your FireWire ports by disconnecting all FW devices, shut down your Mac and unplug it from AC power (wall socket) for 30 minutes. plug it back in and try FW.
If that did'nt work, download the combo update from this site (yours may be corrupt), not Software Update, disconnect all firewire + USB devices except keyboard + mouse, Repair Permissions, re-install update, Repair Permissions again + try. Hers should be the 10.2.8 Combo update. Others reading, download the Combo that applies to your system.
If that still did'nt get it Zap the PRAM. While restarting Mac hold down the following key combo Command-Option-P-R. Keep holding those keys down till you hear the second start-up chime, then release.
For those of you with Macs that are not PowerBooks or iBooks, a bad internal battery can cause FireWire to not be recognized, so make sure it's good!
Good Luck!
Cheers!
DALE

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!
Any reason these wouldn't show up, either in the Finder or Disk Utility? Much thanks for any help!

Hi - did you ever resolve the dropouts? I have a new iMac purchased in Q1 2014 and connect my G-Grive to it via the Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter. My iMac runs 24x7 and this connection drops out on a regular basis - I'd say maybe once every week or so. I have a slightly newer USB3 G-Drive which is connected by the USB socket next to the TB socket on my iMac.
I cannot tell if it is a software issue or a physical (cable movement issue), the plug has never been out and I can't deliberately disconnect it at will by wobbling the cable/plug. So, evidence and experimentation suggests the physical connection is not the issue. This problem has only come about after switching from a physical FW800 connection (my old iMac) to working via a TB adaptor (my new iMac).

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

HELP! Firewire Drives Unmounting by themselves.

I have a small workgroup with a G4/800 server with two FireWire drives connected. One of the drives contains ALL of the organizations files and is shared over the network using the SharePoints software. The other Firewire drive is just a backup drive which is used by Retrospect. What is happening is the users will frequently find the firewire shares mounted over the network on their machines will disconnect and users will receive an alert telling them that the network volume is no longer available or something. When we go to the server we find the Firewire drives are no longer mounted on the desktop. Otherwise, the machine is running normally. Trying to remount the drives usually does not work and I have found that the only surefire way to get them back is to turn the drives off, restart the machine, then turn the drives on. After that, they will mount fine and once again become available to the clients' machines.
I am at a loss as to what would be causing these volumes to unmount or eject themselves. Can anyone help me to troubleshoot this?

External hard drive spontaneously unmounted? Try these tips:
NEW FIRMWARE: Try updating your external hard drive's firmware, which is available from your drive manufacturers Web site--or just use VersionTracker's (www.versiontracker.com) search function to find it. Be sure to back up your data before applying the update, and carefully follow the manufacturers instructions.
OUT OF iSIGHT: If you're using an iSight camera while you're using a FireWire drive, the camera may be interfering with the drive's ability to stay mounted. Try temporarily disconnecting your iSight and moving it to a separate FireWire port. If you have multiple FireWire devices, try using a FireWire hub.
POWER PROBLEM: A faulty power adapter could be causing your drive to unmount. Your drive may not be getting enough juice to stay on, causing the drive to turn off and thereby unmounting it from your Mac. Alternately, the power adapter may not be providing a steady amount of power, causing your drive to turn on and off. Try replacing the adapter. If you can't get a replacement adapter from the hard drive manufacturer, try your local electronics store. Just make sure the adapter you choose has the same connector and input/output voltage. you can find the input/output voltage on the adapter itself.
Cheers! DALE

Oops, I disconnected an external drive and now I can't backup.

I am backing up to an external firewire disk. I accidentally disconnected the external drive. I re-connected it and only two of my three partitions are visible now. I ran disk utility and repaired the disk with no errors. When I go to the finder only two of the three partitions can be seen.
When I backed up with time machine it said that it needs 13.97 GB but only 4.43 GB are available. I cleaned up the external drive but I get the same error. I went to /Volumes/Time Machine (my backup partition) and the files I had deleted were no longer there.
Any body have an idea of what is going on here?

Alan Spitz wrote:
I am backing up to an external firewire disk. I accidentally disconnected the external drive. I re-connected it and only two of my three partitions are visible now. I ran disk utility and repaired the disk with no errors. When I go to the finder only two of the three partitions can be seen.
When I backed up with time machine it said that it needs 13.97 GB but only 4.43 GB are available. I cleaned up the external drive
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
How did you do that? Did you delete TM backup files via the Finder? That's likely to be a large problem. Unfortunately Apple doesn't do a very good job of warning folks not to do that, other than using special "deny everybody everything" permissions. Do a +*Repair Disk+* (not permissions) on it again. That may not gain any space, but if DU can repair them successfully, you may be able to continue using them.
If Disk Utility sees it, but the Finder doesn't, it may just be that you need to reset your Finder preferences. From a Finder window's menubar, select Preferences then either General or Sidebar as appropriate, un-check the box for +External Disks,+ then check it again.
If you get the TM drive repaired, and still have the problem, post back. Include the size of the data on your internal HD, the capacity of your TM drive, and whether there's anything else on it besides TM backups. Also Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Copy and post them here.

Disconnecting daisychained Firewire drives

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