Firewire ports seem shot

Question

I connect my iSight & LaCie External Harddrive to my 2 Firewire Ports and I noticed the computer wasn't recognizing these hardware devices, so upon shutdown, unplugging the computer & ultimate restart.....i found that the computer would then recognize these devices....but 5mins later they would vanish. I called Apple Care & we did a hard reset (I think that's the term) or basically started it up holding down 4 keyboard keys ......that fixed the problem, yet again for only 5mins. The AppleCare guy told me that I had to take the computer apart and hit some reset buttons, I really really don't want to take my computer apart.....can anyone else think of a solution. Or are my Firewire ports shot?

Answer 1

Hey Chris,
This article about troubleshooting" may help you out. Most likely the tech had gotten down to resetting the SMU. Here's an article on resetting the SMU for the RevB and RevC iMacG5s. If the technician talked about taking off the back, you my have a RevA iMac, and you will indeed have to take the back off to access the SMU reset switch. This article has a description of how to reset the SMU for RevA iMacs. I was having this problem with a bad device resetting my Firewire bus. I put the device an another mac and yes indeed, it was not just the iMac. I got a new device and the problem went away. So maybe it's your LaCie drive that's causing the problem? If you have access to another mac you might try it (don't tell your friend what you're doing though...) heh heh.
Let us know how you're progressing, or if this is helpful.