External Drive Problem - Rampant Issue?

I've been searching the Internet for a day now and I see postings all over the place with the same questions and no real answers. I have a 1st Gen iMac G5 running 10.4.6. I have an external drive (the original HD in a SATA->Firewire enclosure) that has worked flawlessley since I had my logic board replaced under the extended Apple warrenty debacle regarding bad capacitors. Just 2 days ago, the drive become unmountable and all of the data disappeared. Drive Utilities won't recognize it, DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro 4 similarly won't help. Figuring the drive had just upped and died, I picked up a Maxtor 300GB drive and put it in the enclosure. Same thing. It mounts, but drops whenever I try to write to it. Neither Backup nor Retrospect can complete a backup to the drive. Other Firewire devices (iSight, 2nd Gen iPod) work fine and System Profiler says the FireWire ports are functional. I tried using Backup and the drive in question (the Maxtor) to backup my G4 PowerBook Ti and it worked flawlessly. Clearly it's an issue with the iMac. I've seen similar postings here, on MacFixit, MacOSXHints, etc. and have yet to see a plausible explanation. I'm open to ideas. I'm not comfortable having this iMac, which has most of my important files, unprotected by backup as it has proved flaky in the past.
matt

Matt,
These problems have been cropping up long before the iMac G5. Read this short post by member Donna Thomas to avoid getting too negative about the situation.
For some users, the use of more than one firewire port at a time can initiate the problem. Something to do with power draw vs the limits of the power supply, I think. I'd recommend trying a PRAM reset, and also a SMU reset (this is performed differently for your model G5 than it is done for the other iMacs): SMU reset instructions (just ignore the title of the article).
While you're booting from your install disc to access Disk Utility to perform Disk Repair, or using the Disk Utility from your Applications/Utilities folder to perform Permissions Repair, or whatever other utilities you're using, at least once shut down and then cold start rather than restart. It used to be, and I think still is, that these are different processes for a Mac, and it just might contribute to recovering the use of the external drive on your Firewire port.

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