External Firewire HDD causing finder crash

I just bought an external Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB HDD. The thing is very finicky about how you plug it in and start it up, do the wrong sequence and it won't ever show up on the desktop.
When I have it plugged in via FW800 The thing causes my finder to become non responsive. When I try to relaunch it, it never comes back online. The only way out of it is a hard shutdown. The drive will work, but only for a brief time and then it will hang causing a never ending spinning beachball fail. I've been reading up on a lot of similar issues ever since upgrading to 10.5.7. I've downloaded Seagate's diagnostic utility, but its only feature is a "test" which never gets going while I'm hooked up via firewire.
As we speak I've swapped the firewire800 for the USB2 connection and all seems to be going well. What's the deal? Is this firmware hang affecting only firewire? Should I stick with the USB until this gets resolved? Is Firewire THAT much faster than USB that I'll be stuck in the file transfer dark ages until this gets fixed?

no no no, usb is plenty fast enough for most poeple, i would not even worry about it, if you can get it working good on usb, go with it. I hate seagates, but thats me, the only reason you will need really fast firewire is for if you do a lot of movie/music editing or changing, and even then the only REALLY long backup will be the first one only, the rest will probably be rlatively quite short.

Similar Messages

External Firewire HDD causes hangs on my Mac Pro & HDD lag using finder

External Firewire HDD causes hangs on my Mac Pro & HDD lag using finder.
I have an 2008 Mac Pro 8 core 2.66hz, 10GB Mem, ATI HD4870 with 4 internal 1 TB Drives. I have 3 external HDDs (2 USB + 1 FW400). The 2 USB HDDs are for Time Machine and backups.
The external FW HD is a 1TB bootable clone of my Internal 1 TB boot HDD.
I have 2 problems ... somethimes when using finder or opening a folder, copying files, starting or quiting a program, I get the spinning beach ball that seems to hang the Mac.
I power off the external FW HDD and everything starts to work. I get an error about the device going offline, I then power the FW HDD back on and all is good.
It seems the external FW Drive tends to hang the system. It occurs pretty frequently.
Any recommendations?
The other issue is that when I use finder to go to a folder, I seem to have to wait for all these drive to spin up. You can hear them all start whirring.
is there a way to remove that lag?

If you recently moved to Snow Leopard you might look for new firmware for your external drive. I would also get DiskWarrior and run that on the external and consider programs like Drive Genius. You might also back it up and wipe it and restore the data. After that I'd consider looking at a new external.
Sleeping drives that take time to spin up after waking....I'd like to learn how to stop that myself. Be sure the Energy Saver in System Preferences is set to not put drives to sleep when possible. Even then my drives will go to sleep and I have up to 6 external added at times and they take quite a while to all spin up. I've never found a way to prevent that.
BTW...external USB drives on a MacPro? Really? Even for backup....

External firewire hdd | no suspend mode?

hi list!
i'm using an external hdd with an prolific 3507 chipset, which causes a few problems with apple mac os x 10.4. so finder hangs sometimes and freezes the whole sys. but it looks pretty good after 10.4.8 update.
unfortunately it doesn't go into suspend mode when i'm hibernating the mac mini. but the strange thing is, that this 'feature' worked before (shortly after i bought it), but stopped working after a kernel upgrade (i think it was 10.4.4). anyway it works with the usb2 connection...
any hints? does suspending your macs lead to a supend of the external firewire hdds?
mac mini 1.66 dc, 1 gb ram Mac OS X (10.4.6)

You probably should re-post in the Boot Camp forum, this is where the Boot Camp and MS Windows folks hang out.

LaCie 500GB External Firewire 800 causes crash every time its plugged in???

My LaCie 500GB Firewire External hard drive causes the computer to freeze every time I plug it in.
I just switched back to Mac from Win XP, where the LaCie was used for almost a year without a single problem. Supposedly, since it is formatted for XP use, it can simply be plugged in to my G5 (dual 2.3, 4BG RAM) and work just fine.
I've upgraded to 10.4.4 and still have issues. I've read this is a 'kernal panic' issue, etc.
What is the solution? I can't even plug it in and reformat it - as soon as it's plugged in the Mac collapses; the screen goes 'grey tinted' and an error message appears telling me to hold down the restart button and restart the computer. If I leave the drive plugged in, as soon as I've signed in on the restart, it crashes/freezes/collapses again, same error (i.e. it's circular).
There seems to be no solution. Any help MUCH appreciated!
Thanks,
Sarge

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
First find out if this is a Firewire 800 or 400 problem. Try connecting a Firewire 400 cable to the drive if it supports it. If it only has Firewire 800 ports, you may want to get a Firewire 400 drive to experiment to see if that's all the problem is.
After a forced reboot, it is also always wise to repair the directory if you are backed up:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
If it detects issues on your source drive that it can't repair, and you are backed up, then I would use Alsoft Disk Warrior.
If it detects no issues, then the problem probably resides in either the cable or the drive you are connecting to. Try a little process of elimination.

External hard drive causing finder to crash

The problem in a nutshell:
On 2 different occasions today, trying to open the hard drive folder (after not accessing the EHD for a couple hours) caused Finder to crash and my Macbook hung on shutdown - I had to unplug the USB hub or do a forced manual shutdown. When restarting the computer, my computer couldn't read the hard drive - I did find a way to fix that (see details below).
I don't know why this is happening in the first place or whether this indicates a bigger problem. Thus far, all data on these drives is backed up elsewhere, but I want these drives to be my backup (aside from DVD hard copies, of course). If anyone knows what may be causing this problem, I'd appreciate your help, thanks!
My system:
I have an early 2008 Macbook with OSX 10.6.8 and 4GB RAM.
Last week I bought two identical Hitachi DeskPro 3TB USB hard drives -- call them External HD A & B --, connected to my Macbook via a USB hub that has its own power source. The EHDs have their own power sources as well. All power sources are plugged into surge-protected power strips. (The EHD B is a cloned copy of the EHD A using backup software).
Each EHD is divided into 3 partitions.
In System Preferences, I did NOT choose to have the hard drive(s) go to sleep whereever possible.
Both EHDs run cool - I've never seen any sign of overheating.
Details of What Happened:
Both times, I was actively using my computer but hadn't accessed the EHD for a couple hours or so. Both times, only EHD A was present in the Finder. (EHD B was physically plugged in, but ejected from Finder, as is my ususal practice.)
Upon restart, I got a message that "a drive plugged into this computer cannot be read", giving me the option to Initialize, Ignore, or Eject. Restarting my Macbook (with one or both EHDs connected) didn't make a difference.
Neither drive showed up in Disk Utility, but they both showed up in System Profiler under USB, albeit with much fewer details than when the drives are showing up normally. The scanner attached to the USB hub has worked just fine.
Both times, the solution to the undetectable EHD problem was to plug in the drive's power source directly into the wall socket and the drive would promptly show up on my desktop. (It doesn't matter whether I plugged the USB directly into my Macbook or kept it plugged into the USB hub.) Once I do that, I can eject the drive, plug it back into the power strip, and it works just fine. I verified the drives in Disk Utility both times and they tested ok.

I'm replying to my own post here since it's far to late to update the original message: To update: after more than 6 months, I can verify that the solution given at bottom of my original post (plugging the drive directly into a wall socket) has worked every time, both in the US and in Asia. I have no idea why this is so, just that it works.

Finder hangs | external firewire hdd

hi list!
unfortunately my finder.app gets completely wasted very often, which is quite annoying. i think this has got sth to do with my external firewire enclosure (raidsonic icybox 351 usb2/fw combo, prolific chipset), which sometimes just stops working (eg. after hibernate). and only if i disconnect the drive or switch it off completely, finder (and all the other finder-like dialogs) reincarnates. i feel the problem came up more often after a firmware update (mac mini or smc), but i could be wrong. no probs with this drive with lin and win so far...
how can i unmount it more safely?
using umount /dev/my_ieee1394disc ?
any ideas, suggestions, similar experiences?
Mac mini Dual [email protected], 1GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.6)

If you recently moved to Snow Leopard you might look for new firmware for your external drive. I would also get DiskWarrior and run that on the external and consider programs like Drive Genius. You might also back it up and wipe it and restore the data. After that I'd consider looking at a new external.
Sleeping drives that take time to spin up after waking....I'd like to learn how to stop that myself. Be sure the Energy Saver in System Preferences is set to not put drives to sleep when possible. Even then my drives will go to sleep and I have up to 6 external added at times and they take quite a while to all spin up. I've never found a way to prevent that.
BTW...external USB drives on a MacPro? Really? Even for backup....

Not able to move iTunes library to Mac OS 10.5.2 - causes Finder crashes

I have struggled most of the day trying to do what in the past has always been very simple - move iTunes library to a new computer/OS. Old eMac housed the library, xml and album art files on the main hard drive. My music library (all the song files) was stored on an external drive. New Mac Pro, along with the same external drive with all the songs, will not accept the transported iTunes folder without crashing the Finder.
I solved the Finder crashing problem by "File/Import..." the xml file from my eMac library. However, using that approach causes me to lose a bunch of library data, including date created, last skipped, and skip count. There may be other parameters I am missing. Lastly, when going the import path - the new Mac Pro can't locate 20 of the songs.
I don't know why OS 10.5.2 won't accept the previous OS (10.3.9) iTunes library files without crashing the finder, but it doesn't. Are there any other work-arounds that will allow me to port the actual iTunes library file containing ALL metadata? I am starting to regret getting this new system - nothing but trouble in upgrading.

First, there is nothing you can do unless you can upgrade the computer to Snow Leopard 10.6.8 which is the minimum version compatible with your iPhone and the current version of iTunes. Furthermore, you will need a compatible version of iPhoto to use. That version should be available for installation using the original installation discs that came with your computer.
Upgrading to Snow Leopard
You can purchase Snow Leopard through the Apple Store: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Apple Store (U.S.). The price is $19.99 plus tax. You will be sent physical media by mail after placing your order.
After you install Snow Leopard you will have to download and install the Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1 to update Snow Leopard to 10.6.8 and give you access to the App Store. Access to the App Store enables you to download Mavericks if your computer meets the requirements.
     Snow Leopard General Requirements
       1. Mac computer with an Intel processor
       2. 1GB of memory
       3. 5GB of available disk space
       4. DVD drive for installation
       5. Some features require a compatible Internet service provider;
           fees may apply.
       6. Some features require Apple’s iCloud services; fees and
           terms apply.

Unreliable mounting of Firewire disks and Finder crashing

On both my MacPro3,1 and MacBookPro5,1 running 10.6.2, mounting of Firewire disks is unreliable. Sometimes a partition being mounted does not show up in the Finder (but does appear as mounted to the df command). When that is the case, launching Disk Utility will cause the mounted partition to appear in the Finder. On mounting the disk, the system log always shows these entries:
21/01/2010 14:32:39 diskarbitrationd[14] unable to probe /dev/disk2s1 (status code 0x0000002D).
21/01/2010 14:32:39 diskarbitrationd[14] unable to probe /dev/disk2s2 (status code 0x0000002D).
21/01/2010 14:32:39 diskarbitrationd[14] unable to probe /dev/disk2s3 (status code 0x0000002D).
On dismounting the disk, the system log always shows these entries:
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 43
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 39
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 38
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 37
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 36
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 34
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 42
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 35
21/01/2010 14:33:13 com.apple.notifyd[13] EV_DELETE failed for file watcher 41
21/01/2010 14:33:14 mdworker[1824] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary.
Sometimes, on dismounting the disk, the Finder crashes, with these entries in the system log:
21/01/2010 14:33:17 com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[165] (com.apple.Finder[175]) Job appears to have crashed: Segmentation fault
21/01/2010 14:33:18 ReportCrash[1827] Saved crash report for Finder[175] version 10.6.2 (10.6.2) to /Users/mike/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Finder2010-01-21-143318Shackleton.crash

Hi Dr. T,
> There is an OnDemand key in there which looks
like it may be doing something useful.
   I'm afraid that I don't know anything about the contents of those files but yes, an OnDemand key sounds like it might do what you want. Although I'm still fuzzy on this point, I gather that what you want is for the device file to be created in /dev but for the volume to not be mounted. As long as the device file is created, you can use the path to the device file as an argument to the "mount" command to mount the drive at any time. I assume that one of "the relevant parameters" in the fstab is the path to the device file.
   I don't know how well I understand what goes on "under the hood" here because I don't do this a lot. I was of the impression that if you eject or detach a drive, the device file is deleted from the device tree. However, if you merely unmount the drive, the device file persists and you can easily mount the drive again.
   By the way, it is supposed to be possible to use fstab with only data that persists between boots. You can use drive UUIDs or labels to refer to partitions. You can use the df command to discover the appropriate device files at the moment and then "diskutil info <device>" to get the UUID.
Gary
~~~~
   If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or
   prohibited by law.
         -- Roy Santoro

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.

Protools doesn't want to open a session from external firewire hdd ;/

i bought this western digital my book hdd which can be connected via firewire. i read that protools recognizes only firewire hdds, so it seemed the best choice.
my macbook mounts the external hdd and everything works perfectly well. but the main issue is, that i can't load protools session-files from that external hdd :// instead protools says something like: " this session is saved on a volume set to "transfer" only....go to workspace and change it to "playback" or "record"!!
but everytime i trie to do so a window pops up telling me that: the hdd can not be designated as an audio playback volume because it is not a valid audio volium!!
i have no idea what is going on:/ it is supposed to work via firewire. can pls someone help.
p.s. i know that this is maybe the wrong place to post protools questions but iam shure u guys can help me =)
thx

oh i think that it is FAT32 formated. :/ ****..
i will reformat it..but will i be able to like save movies and other stuff on it as well ???
thx for ure help =)

Snow Leopard on external firewire hard drive keeps crashing/freezing

I own a 2006 iMac that came with OS X 10.4 Tiger installed and it has always been stable and reliable. Lately I had the need to use some software that only ran on OS X Snow Leopard so I installed an external Firewire (Western Digital) 260GB hard drive and put OS X Snow Leopard on it. For the first few months, everything ran fine, but as the drive slowly filled up (or perhaps with time), my Leopard external drive started giving problems, most commonly, it would lose its Ethernet connection for no reason, or I would get a line of black/multicoloured pixels appearing across my Firefox browser (or something else weird would happen to the display), followed by the rainbow wheel spinning indefinitely... this happened more and more often, when I opened too many applications at the same time, or more than 3-4 tabs in Firefox. Occasionally the screen would "white out" or go completely black. I'd have to physically switch the computer off and on again.
However, I still have not even used 20% of the hard disk space so its not a matter of the hard drive becoming full...
The Tiger internal drive is still running 100% fine so it's not a problem with my RAM...
I've tried verifying/repairing the disk, but it doesn't show any problems. Any ideas about what I should try doing next?
Thanks in advance for any pointers.
Message was edited by: artemisworks

Just so I understand this correctly:
1. Your internal hard drive is on Tiger?
2. Your external (a WD) is on Snow Leopard?
3. Where is the "partition"? Do you have either drive partitioned?
4. You only have the problems when you are booted from/working on something using the external drive?
I've seen quite a few posts here regarding problems with external Western Digital drives; it appears that their internal drives are fine, but the externals do not play nice with Macs after a while (maybe the enclosure they use??).
In any case, if your problems are only when using the Western Digital, I'd say return it if possible, get it replaced, or buy a different brand and use the WD as a not-often-needed extra backup.

Unknown Group - Causes Finder Crash - How do I change group?

Many directories and files on my system after installing Leopard have an "Unknown" group and when I open a "Get Info" window on them and click the "Add" button the beachball appears and Finder crashes.
MacFixit stated "This problem appears to be due to a bad group setting. You can alleviate the issue by putting afflicted users back into the "Staff" group (GID 20) via the following Terminal command:
sudo dscl . append /Groups/staff GroupMembership username
(where "username" is replaced by the afflicted user's name)."
However, this did not solve my problem. Said files and directories still have "uknown" groups and Finder still crashes when I click the "Add" button in the Get Info window.
How to fix?

McToast wrote:
In Tiger, a group with the same name as your username would be created and the UID and GID would match. However, Leopard doesn't seem to be doing that anymore.
No, now it has reverted to the behaviour of 10.2 and before. All normal user accounts were made members of the "staff" group by default. admin users were also made members of the "admin" group, plus a couple of others. There are a lot more in Leopard. Trust me, you will have far fewer problems if you make your primary group 20. Your 'id' output should ideally look like
macbook:~ michaelc$ id
uid=501(michaelc) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),98(lpadmin),81(appserveradm),
103(com.apple.sharepoint.group.3),102(com.apple.sharepoint.group.2),
101(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1),104(com.apple.sharepoint.group.4),
79(_appserverusr),80(admin)
(I put some new lines in there to stop the excessively long line).
I don't know what those sharepoint groups are, either, in case you're wondering

Option-close-all-windows causes Finder crash in 10.7.x

Ever since I installed Lion last year on another iMac, and now on my current iMac, whenever I hold down option and click the red close button on a Finder window to close all open windows, the Finder crashes. It doesn't happen every single time, but enough to really make me angry.
Anyone have a solution for this?

Absolutely it's a Finder bug. It's been going on since I installed Lion the day it was released last year. My current machine, as with any Mac I've ever owned, is always kept up-to-date and I'm not running any Finder enhancers.
What I'd love is if you and other people interested in this thread would try it out for yourself and see what happens. Just have a few Finder windows open and option left-click on the red close button on any window. It doesn't happen all the time. In fact, it might only happen the first time after a restart or initial boot. I'm not sure.
It won't bring your machine to a halt for more than a few seconds and the Finder automatically restarts.
Thanks for responding.

Recent Security Update 2014-002 Causing Finder Crash - QuartzComposer Plugin

Hello,
Recently updated Mavericks with the Security Update 2014-002 and now getting Finder crashes on login. Seems to relate to the QuartzComposer plugin.
No task bar at the top of the screen, just desktop wallpaper and looping Finder crash that can't be resolved. I have the crash log, but not posted one before. Is it safe to post the whole thing online?
Pressing the power button and forcing a restart often fixes the problem but it happening relatively frequently now on each startup and I would like to resolve this. Can't find much on the forums at the moment.
Please help.
Many thanks
Sam

Is it safe to post the whole thing online?
Yes, but make sure there is no personal information in it, which there usually isn't.

External Firewire-HDD only works in Win7 after Reconnect

Hello,
I use a 27" iMac with BootCamp 4.0 and Windows 7 64-bit. I connect an external HDD via the iMacs Firewire 800 port using a 9 to 4-pin cable.
This works fine, but only if I replug one of the connectors AFTER I switched the HDD on. Only switching it on take no effect; Windows explorer didn't show it!
I tried already the "OHCI-konformer IEEE 1394-Hostcontroller (Legacy)" drivers but with the same result - I alway have to reconnect the HDD every time i want to use it - gets on my nerves...
Any solution for this?
Thanks a lot!

Windows and FW800 never were supported and even FW400 is weak.
Thunderbolt devices are not hot pluggable and need to be present on startup in most cases.
USB3 is finding its way into Mountain Lion now that some Macs have them, and support in Windows 8, which gives more than enough bandwidth for any hard drive and most SSDs.
You can try a rescan in Storage in Computer Management.
eSATA and USB3 (and of course USB2) work fine with recognizing.

External Firewire HDD causing finder crash

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