Freeagent External Firewire Drive disappears

I have a "Mac-compatible" 500GB external Firewire Freeagent drive. The drive disappears from the finder when the drive sleeps. When I remove and reseat the drive it returns in the finder. I've used the seagate utility to test the drive - it checks out. Freeagent seems to say that the Mac OS governs the drive sleeping. I've checked for all drives to not sleep in the system settings. What else is necessary to wake a drive in the OS other that yanking and resetting the cable every time. Anyone else having this issue?

Yup, count me in as well. Probably somewhere in System Preferences. Then go to Energy Saver, then look down where the checkboxes are, one says "put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible." My problem is that this happens and then I don't get an EyeTV recording that I wanted because I set EyeTV to record to the external Firewire Drive. So, guess the solution is to stay with the main drive and copy stuff. Sigh!

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Disappearing external Firewire drive.

Hi friends.
My wife's mini has a LaCie external firewire drive attached. She uses it with Backup and it just suddenly disappeared.
It appears to be on and working- but not showing up on her desktop. Is there a way on restart-- to force her mini to look for peripherals it's not seeing? I always get such great help on this forum. Thanks in advance. Dan

I'm curious if/how that link worked out for you. I have been observing problems with Firewire/USB for the past month or more that I allowed my clients to upgrade to 10.4.9 and 10.4.10.
I am finally starting to cross over into the belief that an update within 10.4.9/10.4.10 caused a failure with external Firewire drives -- now I will include USB drives in that belief. I was skeptical for a long while but the coincidences don't line up.
My guess is that Apple updated the Firewire/USB bridge -- perhaps they even made it more efficient. The cost may be that various external drive enclosure manufacturers who coexisted (or even accommodated) Apple's previous bridge, now fail. I don't know if you recall the 10.3.x update that took down Firewires for quite some time to come. The only solution that worked for me then was to boot into OS 9, mount the drive there, and then restart in OS X. A very round-about solution.
So far, I have observed the following failures in the past couple months:
Powerbook G4 1.4Ghz (or so): failed USB LaCie hard drive, no clicking/non-harddrive malfunction
Mac Pro -- Intel Core Duo: two failed Firewire enclosures (Nexstar Vantecs). The drives inside were perfect but the enclosures ceased functioning first on an iMac G5 and then continued to disappear on a Mac Pro tower.
One of these enclosures had also disappeared from a new iMac - Intel. I could get the thing to mount and then it would disappear overnight -- my thought is that perhaps the drives don't remount after sleep? I did not do extensive tests.
I have had another client on an as-of-yet-unknown machine (purchased in last couple years) lose a LaCie Firewire drive... no clicks or hardware failure indications. I will investigate this week.
I had yet another client lose two LaCie drives connected to a Dual 1.0 Ghz G4 Tower. One LaCie drive enclosure seemed to fail completely at Firewire 800 speed and transfer slowly but reliably when dumbed down to Firewire 400. The other LaCie was unreadable even when I transferred the drive to another enclosure. I am still investigating.
On a Mac Mini (Intel) new enclosures from PPA Galaxy Metal Gear would not daisy chain without disappearing.
I admit that I don't want to believe that the recent OS updates could have caused this -- especially after the debacle of 10.3.x. But it is definitely possible and not altogether unlikely. Consider this discussion about a LaCie firmware update tool meant to make them compatible: http://lovemac.org/2007/04/28/external-lacie-firewire-disappeared-from-the-deskh elp/
Not having attempted the Firmware update yet myself, I cannot vouch for it. Firmware updates are not to be taken lightly but they are just the sort of thing that might make the Firewire/USB bridge in the LaCie's compatible with Apple's updates/fixes. Of course, that leaves the other vendors' drives high-and-dry.
Usually, Apple or Apple defenders like to say that the vendors should be writing perfect code and it's not Apple's fault if they optimize or fix code which breaks the vendors' equipment. I think this is a ridiculous argument. Granted, in our legal system, Apple would not usually be obliged to accommodate "faulty" code (even if they might happen to have been the originators of it). But what is the true definition of faulty code? In the realm of technology and computers, there are likely countless kludges and fixes and patches. The whole idea and goal is FUNCTION (ideally). Optimizing or standardizing code is important of course. It means that future authors can rely on the accuracy of the previous authors. But the world -- especially the tech world -- stands to gain more from consistency... from the language of the vernacular. If all the equipment and all the operating systems up to a point have deigned to speak in a consistent kind of pidgin, then it doesn't make complete sense to "fix" it to be some more "accurate" or "refined" grammar. Language works because it's locally consistent, not because it's accurate to some holy grail of grammar.
Specifically: Apple can't switch code midstream and say "oh, I made the code 'accurate,' not my fault if your stuff was built on bad code." Up until that point THEIR stuff was built on "bad" code too! It's a ridiculous argument but what can you do.
At this point, I imagine that Apple attempted to fix something with 10.4.9 and 10.4.10 that it had tried to fix before with OS 10.3.X. Instead, I believe it created an intermittent failure in Firewire/USB drives that leaves the drives inoperable as often as unmountable. It's just a theory based on having seen enough updates and upgrades have a really bad effect. I think people think we live in some future where we can trust our technology and tech manufacturers to get things right (or at least get things right often enough). Surely they're doing the best they can...no doubt.
I'm a little frustrated I should ramp down my expectations. I know. It's not like this is 2020 or 2050. It's really only 2007.
Good luck to us all.

Internal & external hard drives disappeared in Finder

It happened yesterday on my G5 running 10.4.6. I have 2 hard drives inside my G5 and one external hard drive connected with firewire 800. The second hard drive and the external hard drive disappeared in Finder. But the one that has the system on it is fine. They did show up in Disk Utility. But it said they are both "not mounted".
When I tried to repair them in disk utility, it said:
"Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error"
Does anyone know how to fix it? I have lots of stuff in those hard drives.
Thanks
Ti Powerbook G4 1Ghz, PowerMac G5 Dual-Core 2.3 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Sounds like you have a major problem that Disk Utility cannot fix. This has happened before to other users. I suggest you get a copy of DiskWarrior and that will probably fix it. You can read about/buy it here:
Alsoft DiskWarrior
Mulder

Files corrupted when written to external Firewire drive

I recently discovered that files transferred from my internal ATA drives to my external Firewire drives have been getting corrupted.
The corruption is most noticable in Quicktime movies where I can see individual video frames with pixelated blocks of color and short noise bursts in the audio. My concern, however, is that it is happening to any file type and the corruption may not be noticed until it is too late.
I read a few posts from the end of last year that stated the Firewire ports of the B & W G3s have problems. The general solution appeared to be the use a dedicated PCI card.
Here are my questions:
(1) Is there a formal aritcle discussing this problem? (I didn't find one)
(2) Copying files is a VERY basic function of an operating system. Shouldn't there be some kind of error generated if a copied file doesn't match the source? (like a checksum error).
(3) If a PCI Firewire card is the answer, is there anything to watch out for when selecting one?
(4) I'd like a better way to compare souce and destination files after a copy. What application can I use to do a low-level comparison of two files?
Thanks,
John

John,
My reference to RAM was by way of example. Another example of error opportunities is in rebuilding the desktop. I have had files lost because of the desktop changing when the removable media or external hard drive is changed to a computer with a different OS. Rebuilding the desktop restored the files.
The guys that wrote Disk Warrior could give the brutal full on why files appear, disappear and get corrupted. I choose to not trust any one medium so I backup my backups. Sometimes a reliable routine is better than an explaination.
No one has responded to my inquiry about why jpeg files are corrupted when copied from the B&W to a PC zip disk but not to an external HDD. I should try that with a PC formatted HDD. The odd thing is that quicktime will read the corrupted file but jpegview will not. Or the otherway around. I have forgotten the details because I gave up on trying to get an answer.
I would be interested in reading more about file transfers during the process of burning a CD and how buffer underun technology works. As you said, the answer may be so detailed that the explanation wouldnot be understandable without becoming a text book!
Jim

Blue screen of death when La Cie external firewire drive connected

I tested a LaCie external firewire drive on my iMac and it worked fine. I packed it up well and posted it to a friend who gets the blue screen of death when the LaCie is connected to her iMac. She's not even trying to boot from it.
My iMac is 9.1 and hers is 8.1. We are both running Snow Leopard. Was there some problem once upon a time with chipsets or am I mis-remembering?
TIA

Create an ISO (Encore) or folder on your hard drive (Encore or Premiere Elements) and then use the FREE http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download to write files or folders or ISO to disc for DVD or BluRay (send the author a PayPal donation if you like his program)
Imgburn will read the ACTUAL disc brand from the disc, which is not always the same as the box label (Memorex is notorious for buying "anything" and putting it inside a Memorex box)
When you write to disc with Imgburn, use the SLOWEST possible speed setting, so your burner has the best chance to create "good, well formed" laser burn holes... since no player is required to read a burned disc, having a "good" one from a high quality blank will help

External Firewire Drive Ceases to be Detected After DVD Drive Installation

About a week ago, I replaced the original Pioneer DVR-103 drive in my Quicksilver 800 Mhz/dual G4 with a Pioneer DVR-115 to work with newer, faster media. After restarting the machine, I got an alert that told me my 80Gb Maxtor external firewire drive wouldn't initialize. The only real option it gives me is to reformat, thus losing valuable data. That's a non-starter. I've tried restarting the machine with the new DVR unplugged, but I get the same result. I've zapped the Pram, thinking it was a dirty pram, but no go. I've reset the nvram to default, using the command line, but no luck. The odd thing is that applications (like iTunes) continue to access the music files stored on it. I need this drive. Seagate support has been worthless. Any ideas?

About a week ago, I replaced the original Pioneer DVR-103 drive in my Quicksilver 800 Mhz/dual G4 with a Pioneer DVR-115 to work with newer, faster media. After restarting the machine, I got an alert that told me my 80Gb Maxtor external firewire drive wouldn't initialize. The only real option it gives me is to reformat, thus losing valuable data. That's a non-starter. I've tried restarting the machine with the new DVR unplugged, but I get the same result. I've zapped the Pram, thinking it was a dirty pram, but no go. I've reset the nvram to default, using the command line, but no luck. The odd thing is that applications (like iTunes) continue to access the music files stored on it. I need this drive. Seagate support has been worthless. Any ideas?

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

External Firewire drive does not mount on desktop now.

Greetings everyone.
G5 dual, 4.6GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, external firewire drive, formerly worked fine, now is invisible.
Not the drive. New purchase, worked fine until a restart. Not the cable. Power is getting from the G5 to the firewire drive. Not the port. I also have a firewire card instlaled so I have three ports to connect it to (and two on the FW drive). No combination works. Not the computer, the FW drive also fails to appear on an iBook. Not the OS. I did a clean install to make sure.
I'm not a newbie. I know what I'm doing. Until now! DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius and Apple's Disk Utility cannot see the drive.
The FW drive is a Powerbook internal HD inserted into a case, purchased seperately.
At my wits' end. Can anyone help please.

I am suddenly having this EXACT problem. I have two Firelite firewire drives (one 60G and one 80G) that are suddenly refusing to mount on my older dual 1.25GHz G4 tower. They are also suddenly refusing to mount on my non-intel iMac. They will both mount painlessly on my new Intel MacBook Pro, but that's not much use, since the point of the firewire drives is to transfer files between these computers. I'm updating all of them to 10.4.10 to see if that's the issue...

HELP! - Error 1309 - Can't copy file over 10gig to External firewire drive.

I know this is more of a hardware issue but I know that only other final cut users would be copying single files over 10gigs.
I have a G5 that I use for video production. Video Files can be large and to back them up I got an external hard drive ( Maxtor 1-touch 200gig) When I try to copy a file on to it that is 10gigs it give me a 1309 error. I have found that other people have had trouble copying files over 2gigs over to an external firewire drive. But I haven't found any answers. Can anyone offer any advice on how to solve this?
Thanks

If you don't want to format it for the mac, you are limited to file sizes under 2gb.
Another alternative is to hook a firewire drive to your Mac and then share it with your windows machines (the program SHAREPOINTS is useful for this).
The drive can then be formatted Mac OS Extended and, once shared, the PCs can access all files without size limitations.
good luck.
x

How do I back up my Boot Camp partition to external firewire drive?

I have a 15 GB Windows XP Boot Camp partition (FAT32). I want to back it up to a 120 GB external Firewire drive. (I know the backup won't be bootable). In OX X Disk Utility, I formatted the external drive as MS-DOS (FAT). I planned to do the backup using the Windows Backup utility.
However, when booted into WinXP, Windows will not recognize the external hard drive. I thought I might need to create a FAT32 partion of 32 GB or less on the external drive, but I apparently can't do this in OS X or Windows (since Windows doesn't recognize the drive).
Any suggestions on how to backup the Boot Camp partition will be appreciated. I'm mainly interested in preserving all programs and data. Ideally, a clone could be created that could be restored back to the original partition in bootable form, but from studying this and other forums, it dosn't seem to be easy to do this for a FAT32-formatted volume.

My goal was to create a bootable clone of my FAT32 Boot Camp partition, while at the same time increasing the size of the partition from 15 GB to 32 GB if possible. This is what I did:
1. As suggested in this thread, I used Disk Utility to create a disk image. I formatted it as MS-DOS (FAT), and made it 32 GB in size.
2. Used the Finder to copy all files from my 15 GB Windows XP partition to the new disk image.
The following steps were only to determine if the disk image is a viable backup:
3. Removed the internal hard drive with my original Win XP partition, and installed a new internal hard drive.
4. Used Boot Camp Assistant to create a 32 GB Boot Camp partition on the new internal drive.
5. Inserted my Win XP installation disk and started the Windows installation. Formatted the new partition as FAT32. (I used the long rather than the quick format method--not sure if this was necessary.)
6. Continued the Windows installation to the point of restarting the computer, at which time I used the Option key to boot back into OS X.
7. Used the Finder to copy all the files from the 32 GB disk image to the new Boot Camp partition. (This overwrote a few Windows files installed by the aborted Win XP installation.)
8. Restarted and used the Option key to select the new 32 GB Boot Camp Partition. Windows booted as usual with all files, programs, etc. from the original 15 GB partition. Windows did complain about "new hardware" and required a restart, but all appears normal.
This indicates that the disk image containing all the files from my original Boot Camp partition is a viable backup, and can be used to restore the partition if necessary. I'm not sure if formatting the disk image as MS-DOS (rather than Mac OS extended) was necessary, or not.

Can I install OS 9 on an external Firewire drive?

I am not sure if this belongs in the G5 thread or the Leopard thread. Anyway:
I have a Mac G5, running Leopard 10.5.4.
I understand that Leopard will not run Classic applications.
*However, can I install OS 9 on an external Firewire drive? And just boot directly from that drive?*
I have essential OS 9 apps that I really need to keep.
I am aware of Classic emulators that run under Leopard, but that is not an option.
Any advice, insights, suggestions, et cetera in this matter will be appreciated!

+PS I should have added for the sake of others reading this thread…+
You, Dunestrider, can run your Mac in Tiger (and hence in Classic) because, AFAIK, your G5 originally shipped with Tiger.
Others should be aware that you cannot boot a Mac with an OS earlier than the one with which it shipped, i.e. if your Mac shipped with Leopard you cannot do what I suggested in my previous post. See this Apple doc.
Also, Dunestrider, I just realised belatedly that you won't have to buy Tiger - you will still have the original Install disk(s) that came with the G5.
Andreas

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!

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.

60 GB external Firewire Drive Won't Mount

I have a 60GB external Firewire Drive that I have been using for a long time. I just turned on the computer and it won;t mount. I opened up the Disk Utility and I see that on the left side it says "57.3 GB Maxtor." I repaired permissions and verify disk. It still won't mount.
I don't want to have to erase it if possible. There are files I need on that drive. How can I get it to mount so I can grab some files off of it and move it to another drive?
Thanks in advance

Hi Edwurd,
What the message is telling you is that Disk Utility and the "underlying task," the Unix utility fsck, can't repair the volume.
Time for stronger medicine if the data is critical. There are commercial products that work differently and can recover disks when fsck can't. Look at Disk Warrior or Drive Genius. BUT... given that Disk Utility thinks it's a "non HFS volume," I wouldn't be optimistic.
If the external drive's data is unimportant - e.g., a backup you could rewrite - then see if Disk Utility can repartition and erase the drive. If only the catalog or partition map is bad, this will get you a working drive. But if you can't repartition with Disk Utility, suspect a hardware malfunction and check your warranty.
Good luck,
John

Purchasing external firewire drive to work with Canon HV-30/MacBook Pro

I want to purchase an external firewire drive to run FCE4. I have a Canon HV-30 (Vixia). I have read that external FireWire drives do not work well with Canon DV cameras? Is this true of the Canon HV cameras? and if so, has anyone had success with a particular firewire drive model with this camera?

Hi(Bonjour)!
I don't know for this model but it's the implementation of firewire protocol on Canon's models that could make a problem.
So, you could have problem but it's not absolute.
Michel Boissonneault

Freeagent External Firewire Drive disappears

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