External firewire drive damage from bad port?

After plugging my LaCie 200 Gb firewire external drive into a PC, I can no longer mount it on my mac. Plugging it in freezes access to other attached firewire devices, which recover after it is unplugged. A second drive was damaged in the same way by the PC.
Would a bad firewire card/port in the PC cause this?
Is there any way to repair the damaged external drives?

Yes it is bus powered although given their sub-note I wouldn't use any other bus powered FireWire device at the same time as this drive.
As for installing applications of an external drive, yes you can. It is not recommended that you move Apple applications to anywhere other than where they are installed to. In any case, if an installer gives you the choice then go for it.

Similar Messages

Can't daisy-chain Firewire drives reliably from 1-port Powerbook. Hub??

I have found that I cannot get a daisy-chained Firewire drive to mount more than 50% of the time. This problem doesn't happen with Tiger with the same drives. I have tried 4 different brands of late-model Firewire drives (Iomega, Smartdisk, Maxtor, and Seagate) with different cables and what happens is that a drive that is directly attached to the 12" Powerbook will mount, but the second chained drive fails to mount a majority of the time. Since I only have one Firewire port, this is preventing me from using more than one drive at a time, and I lost two Firewire drives to corruption today. Three out of four partitions lost contained bootable backups of Leopard and Tiger. Ouch!
This issue could prevent from using Leopard with my Powerbook, which is supposed to be Leopard-compatible. I can't remake the clones too easily with only being able to attach one drive at a time. I am thinking I will order a Firewire hub and try that, but I am not sure if that would be a solution, and I am wondering why I can always daisy-chain under Tiger, and not under Leopard. Does anyone have experience with Firewire hubs and Firewire operation details? Will I be able to get reliable Firewire with a hub?

I have exactly the same problem !
I have found this :
Using Multiple FireWire Devices at the Same Time
Power Macintosh computers can transfer perfect digital video (DV) on FireWire when no other devices are using the FireWire bus. If you have problems transferring digital video, make certain that no other FireWire devices are being used at the same time. Turning on a DV camera that is already connected may cause a FireWire hard disk to stop working. If this happens, turn off the camera and verify that the hard disk has recovered. Then unplug the FireWire cable from the camera, turn the camera on, and reconnect the FireWire cable to the camera. Check with the hard disk vendor for a possible firmware update to prevent this problem.
here:
http://www.2ndwave.com/firewire.asp
At the moment I can't upset what I'm doing to test it but I intend to do that as soon as I finish copying transferring...
I have the following device attached to different firewire ports:
a firewire video device connecting my G5 Desktop to the TV screen
a firewire ibot
I thought I would give u a head start

Trouble with installing 10.5 from an external firewire drive

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.
Anyway, I followed instructions on a this website to install 10.5 from an external firewire drive. (http://iuseapple.com/blog/apple-how-to/advanced-os-x/2007/10/29/how-to-install-l eopard-from-external-firewire-hard-drive/)
But I get stuck and am not able to actually get my imac to boot from the installer. Basically, I am able to use disk utility to create a copy of the disk image on my macbook. That resulting file ends in ".cdr" and it mounts when I double click it.
And I partitioned my firewire hard drive without problems.
I think I'm messing up when it comes to doing the restore. If I try to drag the .dmg mounted file in to the "source" it doesn't work (is greyed out). If I try to drag the mounted .dmg there than it works, but I get an error when I click "restore" (something about scans and images not being found). I tried physically copying the .dmg file onto the partition, but then when I plugged the HD into my imac, I wasn't able to get the imac to boot from the installer.
What am I doing wrong? If someone could walk me through these last steps I'd appreciate it!

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.
- And I installed Carbon Copy Cloner and made the disk image that way on my macbook. Still, I tried everything and the iMac is not able to boot from the firewire drive!
Since my DVD drive is broken, this is the only way for me to install 10.5! Help!

IMac 2.8Ghz + booting from external FireWire Drive

I was wondering if anyone has 'booted' from an external FireWire drive using the FireWire 400 port?
After going through the issue of reformatting my external drive with the GU-ID partitioning scheme, I found that the drive would mount on the FW400 port but wouldn't boot. In the end I used the FW800 port and the drive booted up first time. On my old PowerBook I could boot from both FW400 & FW800, does anyone know why FW400 doesn't work or is it my iMac?

If it mounts then you can install OSX or clone OSX and then boot from it. From what you are saying a bootable partition will boot on 400 just not on 800, which is quite odd, I concur.
Note that they are notorious for needing the right power supply and they all look identical - I had problems of recent with a triple extreme 1 TB on FW 800, and took it to LaCie (a mile from where I work) - they told me I was using the wrong power supply and gave me the right one free. When I got home I did have the right one in a pile with others. 4.2 A vs. 2.2 A and it worked great. And I have a spare free power supply.
I don't think drivers even enter into it at all with firewire, e.g. drive specific drivers.

Is it possible to boot a G4 (pci graphics) from an external firewire drive?

I have a Lacie 250 gig bootable external firewire drive which is recognized on my Power PC G4 400 but I cannot get it to boot from this drive. The procedure works fine on my ibook... I looked into a possible firmware update but the apple site says no update is necessary for the G4 400/pci graphics...
Any suggestions?

There sure are some radically contradictory posts here! (This isn't typical, at least in this section of the Discussions, RMx2.)
Can anyone who has posted here (or might join in here) actually boot from a hard drive connected via USB? I just tested this with OS X and I can't. For some time now, the Discussions have been riddled with posts, whether 100% accurate or inaccurate, that Macs don't boot from USB drives, despite the seemingly conflicting info in the article that Don kindly referenced. (John Huber: Don't eat your words just yet, John!)
Here's my personal experience, for what it's worth... I have a rev.2 B&W G3 which recognizes, reads, and writes to drives via USB, but refuses to boot from them (I tested with OS X 10.3 and 10.4). I also have a QS 2002 G4 that yields the same results. The QS G4 will, however, boot from these drives via FW. I used a WiebeTech ComboDock for testing this with both USB and FW. I tested with two different hard drives, both of which are known to have stable, working versions of OS X on them.
My G3 running OS X 10.3.9 sees the USB-connected drives in the Startup Disk Preference Pane, but when I click to Restart after selecting the USB system folder there, I get a beachball (haven't seen that in awhile...) and have to Force Quit System Preferences. Console tells me that that it could not get open firmware information or set open firmware information, and that it can't touch or set System/Library/CoreServices/BootX, returning Error 1 running bless.
On the QS running Tiger, the USB OSs don't even appear in the Startup Disk Pane of Sys Prefs. I can see the USB drive(s) using the Startup Manager, but selecting them and restarting results in a hung startup to a spinning cog with a prohibitory sign on the screen...
I haven't tried playing around with open firmware NVRAM settings (and don't intend to, except perhaps for trying an NVRAM reset), nor have I attempted to boot to OS 9, reset the startup disk there, and attempt the boot again to the USB device in OS X and in OS 9, which I may try later on when I have a bit of time...
Gary
Message was edited by: Majordadusma

Can WinXP be loaded and booted from external firewire drive?

The subject line probably says it all but:
Does the recent firmware upgrade and/or BootCamp allow you to install WinXP on an external Firewire drive rather than partitioning the iMac Core Duo's internal drive?
Mike
Intel iMac Mac OS X (10.4.6)

The other problem is XP itself doesn't support booting from firewire. Even if someone could figure out how to install to an external from bootcamp, you would still have to contend with XP.
Glor

Boot from external Firewire Drive-cannot repair or optimize internal drive.

Hi all
Connected my new 300 GB Seagate External Firewire Hard Drive today.
Installed Tiger from DVD. Updated to 10.4.3.
Installed Tech Tool Pro 4. Updated to 4.1.1.
Booted from External Firewire Drive.
Disk Utility cannot Verify or Repair internal drive. Does not say or do anything.
Tech Tool Pro cannot repair volume or optimize. Says, "Cannot Unmount Volume."
Is there a fix for this?
Thank you for the help!
Jeff
eMac 800 nVidia. Mac OS X (10.4.3) 160 GB Internal HD. Pioneer Superdrive. 1 GB RAM.

Hi
I did name the new external completely different from the internal.
After booting from the external Firewire Hard Drive, I tried running Disk Utility and Tech Tool Pro from both drives. No matter which drive I run the Utilities from the same things happen every time...
Nothing happens when trying to use Disk Utility to Verify Volume on internal eMac Drive.
Tech Tool Pro says, "Cannot unmount volume" when trying to check Volume or Optimize internal drive.

Booting os x from *partitioned* external firewire drive?

Hi all,
my internal hard disk (on a 12" powerbook G4 867 mhz running osx tiger 10.4.10) has started acting weird (many people are reporting failing hard drives, and I'm assuming mine is failing too), so I'm preparing for replacing it with a new hard drive.
I've backed up the drive to an external firewire drive (LaCie portable 80 GB firewire drive "Design by F.A. Porsche") using Carbon Copy Cloner with the option 'make bootable' selected.
PROBLEM: I can't boot OS X using my clone on the external drive.
I'VE TRIED:
1. holding down Command-Option-Shift-Delete while booting to bypass the internal drive. (This didn't work: I saw an os 9 icon blinking/alternating with a question mark for a while, and then the computer booted from the internal hard disk.)
2. holding down Option to select the external drive in Startup Manager. (Didn't work either: Startup Manager opened fine, but only showed my internal drive volume. I tried clicking the 'rescan' button, but it couldn't find my external drive.)
3. SELECTING THE EXTERNAL DRIVE under Startup Disk in System Preferences. Note that the external drive volume *did show up* there. So under some conditions at least, the external volume is identified as a bootable volume. (This didn't work either, though: When I shut down the computer and booted up with the external drive connected, it still booted up from the internal drive.)
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION?
My external drive is partitioned into three partitions of different formats:
1. "Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)"
2. "Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)"
3. "MS-DOS File System (FAT32)"
The bootable volume is the first partition with the os x format.
Could my problem be caused by this partitioning of my external drive?
Either way, what to do?? I hope some of you savvy people out there can help me out.
Cheers,
Philip

Hi Philip,
My problem has been fixed, & I imagine it's the same for you...:
With the excellent help from Dave Nanian at shirtpocket.com - the developer of 'SuperDuper!' (thanks Dave - you rock!), the problem (as Michael suggested) is to do with the Partition Scheme of the drive.
If your drive was like my portable LaCie Porsche drive, it was FAT32-formatted for PC out of the box. This format has an underlying MBR (master boot record) partition-scheme. When re-partitioning a drive in 'Disk Utility', the original partition-scheme sticks, so if you simply re-partition the drive to Mac OS Extended, it will still have an MBR partition scheme... which Macs cannot boot from!
For a Power PC Mac to be able to boot from an external firewire drive, the drive MUST have an APM (Apple Partition Map) Partition Scheme underlying the Mac OS Extended partitions. To do this, click on the 'Options' button in 'Disk Utility' when on the 'Partition' page before partitioning. You will see the options:
GUID Partition Table (for Intel Macs... (n.b. Power PC's cannot boot from a GPT drive))
Apple Partition Map (to create a bootable drive for a Power PC Mac)
Master Boot Record (to create a bootable PC drive)
So.... to make your external drive bootable for your Powerbook G4, choose 'Apple Partition Map' in the 'Options' page prior to partitioning.
Special note about Intel Macs: Contrary to info supplied by Apple, an Intel Mac CAN boot from an APM-partitioned drive (this is why the OSX installer can be univerally bootable!), BUT, the problem is that the OSX installer will NOT let you install OSX-intel on an APM-partitioned drive....
You can, however, clone an Intel-Mac-OSX internal drive that has a GPT partition-scheme (using CCC or SuperDuper) to an external drive with APM, & the Intel Mac will still be able to boot from that clone...
The only real use for doing this, though, is if you want a multi-partitioned backup drive with separate bootable partitions for OSX-PPC & OSX-Intel machines. (Remember that a PPC machine cannot boot from a GTP-partion-scheme drive, hence the need to use APM in this instance seeing as the Partition Scheme applies to the entire drive (it can't be different for each partition.)
Good luck - let us know how you get on!
Jason

Cannot boot my mini from CD/DVD or external firewire drive

The problem I face is simple: I cannot boot my mini from CD/DVD or external firewire drive.
When I boot with option key down, I see the Mac OSX boot and a ghost Windows from an early BootCamp installation, removed long ago (I now use Parallels).
I tried disconnecting everything but keyboard and mouse, to no avail.
I tried resetting PRAM and NVRAM.
I tried disconnecting the mini from everything and waiting one night.
I tried erasing the disk from another Mac when booting the mini as FireWire drive.
And still, the mini refuses to boot from the original CD, or any external drive.
Anyone has an idea whether it is software or hardware ?
Could it be a consequence of the early Boot Camp install and then removal ? Is there a way to reverse this ?
Any help or hint will be appreciated.
Best regards
JC
Intel mini early 2006 Mac OS X (10.4.10) 2gb RAM, core duo

Hi DaddyPaycheck,
Thanks for your message. Indeed, I failed to mention the problem from the Startup Disk Preference point of view.
Bootable CD and/or external disks also never appear in Startup Disk Prefs.
It indeed sounds like time for a backup (I did that) and a HD erase and reinstall of OSX. But since the CD does not want to boot, I tried installing from another Mac with my mini booted as FireWire drive. And that failed, probably because the master mini I used was a G4 one...
Best regards
JC

Booting from external Firewire drive--possible?

If I add a USB/Firewire card to my Beige G3 minitower (300MHz), can I then boot from an external Firewire hard drive on which I have installed Panther? A comment by Tina Garfield in another thread seems to suggest this is indeed possible. (I didn't want to "threadjack" that discussion, so I created this new one. I hope Tina sees it and can help me.)
Tina wrote the following:
Having Firewire allows you to have external drives,
which you will be able to boot from, and make
backups and maintenance especially easy.
I was under the impression that the Beige G3 can't see iadd-on Firewire/USB cards until the machine has booted from the internal hard drive. I really hope I am wrong! If it is indeed possible to have the machine recognize the external drive at startup, and there is something I need to do to enable this, please let me know.
Thanks!
GeeKay

Hi GeeKay,
Ditto to everything Grant posted, with an extra reminder to be sure to download XPostFacto 3.1 and not version 4. I believe on the XPF page ( http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto3.ht ml ), the download for 3.1 is a little bit down the page.
If/when you buy an external FW drive be sure it has an Oxford chipset. If the description does not include mention of the the Oxford chipset, I would strongly recommend finding another external drive that does specify this. Our Beiges are very particular about what they will accept for external booting, and the Oxford chipset is a critical component.
Also, I've found, since I do partition my external firewire drives, that I can boot only from the first partition of the external drive, similar to the behavior of our internal drives. In addition, with one of my Beiges, my "helper" disk that I specify to XPostFacto to allow me to boot externally must be the first partition of my internal drive.
I don't believe that you can actually INSTALL to an external drive. I simply cloned my internal drive's system over to the FW drive. This can be done with software such as the free Silverkeeper ( http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/ ) or with shareware SuperDuper ( http://www.shirt-pocket.com/ ) which are both great for all backups. I happen to prefer SuperDuper because of its redundancy -- it explains EVERY step before you take it and then, even after you tell it to go ahead, it asks you again to be sure That's what you want to do.
Once set up, however, it is extremely cool, and helpful, to be able to boot externally. If your external drive is dual USB/FW, you will only be able to boot when connected via Firewire. None of the Beiges are USB-bootable.
Hope this helps, and keep us posted,
Tina

Stupid question: force booting from external FireWire drive

My PowerBook is refusing to boot from it's hard drive (flashing ?/folder), which I'll be attempting to repair using DiskWarrior, etc.
But it's also not finding and booting from the OS X installed on my external FireWire drive (which it could do under normal circumstances). How do I force it to do that given that I'm unable to set the Start Up Volume in the normal manner?
PowerBook G4 17" 1.5GHz 512MB 80GB Mac OS X (10.3.6)

Dale,
Thanks for your response. I've been through the usual stuff as in your reference and I eventually got it to boot off the external HD by just leaving it long enough - it took maybe 10-15 minutes. I'm booted from it now. I hadn't thought of using the Startup Manager, but will try to remember next time.
As for the internal HD, it's looking like it's dead - neither Disk Warrior nor Data Rescue II seem to be able to see it. I tried Disk Utility from the external HD, but it doesn't see it and nor does the Profiler. Maybe it's just a loose connection internally. There is a noise coming from the PB from about just under the division between the left hand rest and the speaker. It sort of sounds like a disk continually being read or written - ie. a sort of very rapid clicking, but I don't think it's the HD. And I don't think it's the fan. Anyone with any ideas before I call AppleCare?
I did have a very similar problem a few weeks ago (http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1465680#1465680), but Disk Warrior fixed it apparently with next to no problems. I was going to wipe the drive at the weekend & reinstall, but didn't get round to it in the end ... Fortunately I had a backup this time and was able to restore my user simply by copying it.

Panic when booting from external firewire drive

Hi all
I have just returned from holidays to the following problem:
While I was away a colleague upgraded a PowerMac G5 from OS X 10.3 to OS X 10.5.1 . He also upgraded an OS X 10.4 installation on an external firewire drive to 10.4.11 while connected to the G5. Now suddenly the 10.4.11 installation on the external firewire drive will not boot when connected to the PowerMac G5 - it kernel panics almost immediately. However it will still boot when connected to a PowerMac G4.
Has anybody seen or experienced this? Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

My colleague has just decided to format and recreate the OS installation on the external drive.

Booting from external Firewire drive.

Hello there.
I got a brand new 17" 2g intel iMac and I'm very happy with it.
However I missed my 2 internal drives so I bought another firewire drive to make backups, having an emergency system, etc.
But apparently I can't install a system with this external drive (nor in the second ext. drive I got).
Is this a common issue? Do I have to do something?
(I'm using the Installer CD I got with the iMac).

It is important to note that a traditional APM partition can, in fact, boot an Intel Mac - I have done it on numerous occasions. Specifically,
- A GUID partition is required to install (new) an Intel version of 10.4.x. If the partition is APM, the installer will not recognize it as bootable and will not allow for installation. In this case, the GUID format is required.
- an APM partition can be used to boot the Intel as long as it is cloned.
I've used (and continue to use) Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner. Despite being a PPC app, it works as expected. I tested this when I first received my Intel iMac since I would inevitably need to use one drive (with multiple partitions of course) to boot a mixture of PPC and Intel Macs at work. As such, I have one external Firewire drive with 3 APM partitions - 1 with 10.3.9 (PPC) for labs that still run Panther, 1 partition with 10.4.x for labs that have upgraded and 1 partition with 10.4.x Intel for the 1 lab where the new Macs are slowly being integrated.

10.4.4 corrupts external Firewire drives

I had now twice corruption with external firewire drives after a hardreset (not normal shutdown, but holding the powerbutton until the mac turns off).
The first time I was forced to do this, because the whole Mac froze after a program run (not from Apple). At that time I had two external FW harddisks. One older 200GB Maxtor and one newer 250GB Maxtor, the newer one was backup, the old one master.
Because at that time I thought the old harddisk might be bad, I bought another 250GB Maxtor same as the backup drive and synced (with rsync on the terminal) all data there. I tried to recover data before that, but Disk Utility completly failed, it just ejected the disk, same with DiskWarrior.
Now, after another hard reset (Suddenly all programs locked up, and I couldn't do anything else) I had two corrupted. both the 250GB backup and the 250GB new master.
Again Disk Utility failed, although it didn't eject the disk. DiskWarrior also failed to do anything. After I tried to repair it diskwarriro said it had an error. Then I could repair it with Disk Utility, but the luck was short. soon after I couldn't read some files, and then again I had the same errors on both disks.
Right now I sync all my data from my master disk to the old 200GB Maxtor (which I reformated in between).
I am just really scared if all hard resets will corrupt my external FW harddisks. I rely on them as I only have 40GB internal data. And what good does a backup do, if it also gets corrupted.
Anybody with similar problems?
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.
There is no valid reason to write to any drive's partition table on exit unless specifically told to do so by me via the disk utility, so stop it already.
iMac G5 20 Mac OS X (10.4)

Best Way to Protect Data on External Firewire Drives?

I have a number of external firewire drives on my IMac and like many others have experienced data loss due to various things.
What I've just started to do is use certain of these drives, external USB drives too, just for backup, not to work on. I put the video work on there each day and then dump the drive in the Trash, turning it off, so that their files can't be corrupted.
With my other firewire drives I do the same: dump in the trash and turn the drives off. I don't unplug the firewire cables, just dump the drives in the trashcan and turn them off. When I want to use a particular drive I turn it on and it comes up on the desktop.
I have at times restarted and then powered the external drives on.
My question is: which is the safest way to do this? is it okay to trash a drive, turn it off and then switch it back on when needed?
Thanks so much for any help!

I have been doing what you describe for years now, and have never experienced a problem. When the drive is not needed for a while, I eject it and power it off. You can also disconnect it from the Mac and unplug the drive physically, if you want extra "protection" against, say, a power surge or some other malfunction that might damage the powered off (but still connected) drive, but I would think those types of events are very highly unlikely.
People might debate whether the risk of wearing out the firewire or USB ports from repeatedly inserting and removing the cables is greater than the risk of some damage when connected to the Mac but powered off. Either one is infinitesimally small, I believe, and neither has probably been accurately measured.

External firewire drive damage from bad port?

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