ISight Firewire Hard Drive issues? Anyone?

Hey there, I just picked up a refurbished 1.83 Core 2 Dou Mac Mini, and I've got a weird issue going on.
The single Firewire port is giving me some greif - I've got a MyBook 500 gig FireWire drive plugged into the port. I've also got an iSight (and a bunch of other FireWire devices) but I seem to have issues chaining them.
When I plug the iSight into the second FireWire port of the drive, it isn't happy. I get a really distored picture, interlaced fields, and it runs at about 1 frame every 3 seconds. Then it crashes iChat, or the screen previewing the iSight image goes gray and tells me the "camera is being used by another application".
When I plug the iSight in directly, it works great.
I read some of the other posts and it sounded like it might be a power issue, so I bought a Belkin powered 6 port FireWire hub (I've got a 3G iPod I also need to plug in, and a external dual layer burner, and my FireWire camera, so I needed one anyhow).
Still having the problem! When the iSight is on the same chain as another device, it freaks out. If it's the only device in port, everything is fine.
Anyone else having or had this problem?
Thanks!

Hi RocketChicken-
Greetings and welcome to the Apple boards.
iSight cameras are notorious for being picky about what else is connected to the FW bus. Does it cause problems just being plugged in or only when it is on?
You may find more help in the iSight forum: Forum : iSight
Luck-
-DaddyPaycheck

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Which external firewire hard drive for protools and imac?

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I highly recommend that Mercury Elite Pro drives from OWC as well. They are very stable and reliable due to their use of the Oxford 911 chipset and not the more common - and more problematic - Prolific chipset. I also use SuperDuper to make fully bootable clones of my internal drive for backing up everything.
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Has anyone else been having hard drive issues with 13" MacBook Pro barely a year old?

Has anyone else been having hard drive issues with 13" MacBook Pro barely a year old?

Yes, BUT...
... there are many problems that are really easy to eliminate by replacing the Hard drive, including ones that have nothing to do with actual Drive Hardware failure. These include corrupted install of Mac OS X, its EFI partition, clobbered partition tables, or the appearance of Bad Blocks in a critical area.
Any of these problems can sometimes be eliminated by re-initializing the entire drive and writing Zeroes, and re-installing from scratch. The trouble is, this process takes hours to complete, and is not guaranteed to be successful -- you may still need a new drive after all that effort.
I learned from my Plumber that consumers have no appetite for solutions that might work, and detest return visits for any related problems whatsoever. You or your friend may have had your drive replaced, not because it actually failed, but because the situation was troublesome, and the provider thought you would not tolerate anything less than a crisp, complete fix on the first attempt. And based on the cost of technician time, it may have even been cheaper that way.

Unstable firewire hard drives performance in 220 volts countries

Over the years, I often travel back and forth to the US, Asia and Europe with my MacBook Pro and external firewire hard drives, which were purchased in the USA. While in Europe or Asia, which generally runs on ~220 volts, I've had several experiences whenever I daisy chained more than 1 external firewire hard drive to my laptop, either the connection was very unstable, resulting in drives randomly unmounting; or my current dilemma where the 2nd drive is not mounting at all. I never experience these issues at all while I'm in the US. My guess is that the difference in voltage (110 vs. 220) or cycles (60 Hz vs. 50 Hz) is affecting the drives somehow. I have experienced this with G-drives, and the Newertech Voyager Q and Wiebetech Traydock which are well built, reliable enclosures. I pair the enclosures with Seagate or Hitachi drives. All the enclosures' AC adapters specifically state that they're rated for 100-240 volts. I thought hooking all my drives to a 2000 watt voltage transformer would solve the problem but it didn't. Using 1 firewire drive is not a problem, but the daisy chaining seems problematic. The dilemma is I MUST daisy chain the drives for backup purposes and just for general data wrangling. Plus my MacBook Pro only has 1 firewire port. My laptop and firewire port is not the problem, as I've upgraded several times over the years.
My questions are:
1. Has anyone else ever experienced USA drives acting funky in 220 volts countries?
2. Anyone have an idea for a solution to this problem?
Thanks so much,
HL
PS. On perhaps a related note, when I plug my MacBook Pro into a 220 volts outlet and lay my wrists below the keyboard, there is a current or vibration that I do not feel when I'm in the US.

There is no difference in the power delivered to the computer or the drives, it's 12-15v wherever you are, and it's DC so there are no cycles, I think this is not the right tree you're barking up.

EMac and FCE using an external firewire hard drive as a Scratch Disk

I am about to purchase a new hard drive for use with FCE as a scratch disc.
I am looking for people who are "actually" using an external firewire hard drive as a scratch disc with FCE on an eMac.
I am interested in the following info.
1. What Make, Model, size HD are you using?
2. What rpm speed and cache size?
3. Any problems? Crashed HD's? Working good?
4. Do you have any other firewire devices plugged into your eMac?
I blew up 3 eMacs last year. Apple could not figure it out or anyone else.
I was using a Lacie P3 250/8mb firewire drive as a scratch disc.
Thanks in advance.
eMac 1.25ghz/1gb RAM/160gb HD/Superdrive Mac OS X (10.3.9)

1. What Make, Model, size HD are you using?
I have two LaCie Porsche drives, one 160 GB and another 250 GB (more like 159 GB and 233 GB in actuality).
2. What rpm speed and cache size?
They're both 5400 RPM if memory serves me. The 160 drive has 2 MB cache and the 250 has 8 MB cache.
3. Any problems? Crashed HD's? Working good?
The 160 GB drive caused me some problems, but I'm chalking most of that up to a bad FireWire cable. LaCie replaced the cable for free, and I haven't had any significant problems.
4. Do you have any other firewire devices plugged into your eMac?
Since I've got a 15" PowerBook, I'm limited to 1 Firewire bus, so the two drives, a LaCie DVD burner, and my Sony Handicam are all daisy-chained together. Having the Handicam on the bus tends to slow things down, but I can certainly capture to the drives with no problems. If I'm doing a lot of editing, though, I'll unplug the camera to speed up the bus.
I use the 160 GB drive primarily for backup, storing finished projects, and storing stock footage. The 250 GB drive is used solely for video capture and render.
The only thing I might caution you with is that the LaCie Porsche drives are rather picky about how they get turned on and plugged into the FireWire bus. You need to plug the power in, turn them on, and THEN plug in FireWire -- it won't work if you have FireWire plugged in when you turn them on. It's not a big issue, as long as you're aware of it. (It could be that my PowerBook is a little wonky, too.)

Incredibly slow MacBook, Internal Hard Drive issues...

Good morning everybody! I'm apologize if this post is extremely wordy...
I am extremely baffled by a particular issue with a MacBook 2.0GHz C2D which belongs to a friend of mine. The warranty is expired.
_Brief history:_
Several months ago, this MacBook could not find a bootable volume. The drive would not mount when booting from an external FireWire hard drive. It would not mount when the MacBook was put in Target Disk Mode and connected to another Mac. When booting from an external USB hard drive or with my MacBook Pro connected to the MacBook via Target Disk Mode, the MacBook booted up quickly. I came to the conclusion that the internal hard drive must have failed and needed to be replaced. Ultimately, the data was not recoverable from this drive.
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I checked the Activity Monitor to ensure CPU & System Memory Usage was not going crazy. All Processes where normal with adequate CPU & Memory headroom.
I took the MacBook apart thinking that the SATA Controller Cable might be loose. No, it was firmly in place. I reassembled the MacBook and booted it up again. Still incredibly slow!
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_Now for the kicker..._
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I tried booting into Single User Mode, but it gets stuck on "Waiting for root device"
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I then partitioned the MacBook's hard drive when connected to the G5, ejected and proceeded to attempt OS reinstall. No dice! The hard drive is not even detected by the Disk Utility on the Leopard Install DVD.
Finally after several reattempts, the hard drive is recognized, but is extremely slow when trying to reinstall...and again, ultimately install fails. Using Disk Utility from Leopard Install DVD, the hard drive fails to unmount when I try formatting.
I don't have Apple Hardware Test disc for the MacBook or Apple Service Diagnostics disc for this model. Running TechTool Pro shows hardware to be okay, disk controller onboard the Fujitsu drive is okay, but running SMART & Surface Scan takes a long, long time (which I'm certain will ultimately error out). Running Drive Genius takes a long, long time as well.
Conclusion:
I think the SATA Controller Cable is defective. I can't think of anything else that would cause disk errors or performance issues like this. Your input is truly appreciated!

Even though no one responded to my post, I thought I'd share the resolution with the entire Apple community. I hope this information will be helpful to some of you with MacBooks or MacBook Pros that may be running painfully slow or may be exhibiting hard drive issues because your machine won't recognize the boot drive or fails to properly boot on a perfectly healthy S.M.A.R.T. verified hard drive. It just might be the hard drive connector/cable. Here it goes...
I visited my local Apple Retail Store and asked a "Genius" at the Genius Bar about this issue and told him my thoughts about a possible failed hard drive connector/cable. First, he didn't even know what a hard drive connector was! Then, he arrogantly stated that he never heard of such a thing and that these cables never fail. Finally, he blatantly dispelled this as a possibility.
On the contrary with my experience, I have had many failed PATA controller cables that required replacement when supporting the desktop PC's at work. I have personally owned and supported many Apple manufactured laptops and desktops and have never encountered this issue on a Mac...until this MacBook!
So, after looking at the Service Manual for the MacBook, I went over to my local Apple Authorized Service Provider and purchased the Hard Drive Connector Apple Part #922-7579. I replaced the original cable, reassembled and proceeded to boot the MacBook with the Leopard DVD installer. The Fujitsu drive was immediately recognized and was able to be formatted and Leopard installed without incident. The MacBook boots off the internal hard drive as normal again and works nice and fast again.
Thank you all for your time!
:D

Large OS 8.6 Compatible Firewire Hard Drive?

I'm needing a larger firewire hard drive, which must able to back up my older Macs (running 9.1 and 8.6)
However the newest 500GB ones all seem to list OS 10.x as their minimum requirement. (Not sure whether this is the minimum for doing stuff like formatting and partitioning, or whether these drives will not mount at all under OS9)
Can anyone suggest a large firewire external drive which will mount and perform backups under OS 8.6 ?

It should look somewhat like this:
xxxx% sudo du -x -h -d 1 /
Password:
24K /.fseventsd
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0B /.TemporaryItems
0B /.Trashes
0B /.vol
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9,0M /bin
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4,5K /dev
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1,0K /net
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10,0G /opt
4,4G /private
6,8M /sbin
4,0G /System
157G /Users <------ in this example this folder contains the most GB's
1,7G /usr
4,0K /Volumes
xxxG / <------ xxx GB : this is the total for all folders above.
So the results are presented one folder at a time in alphabetical order (?) with the total at the end.

Can PB boot from an External Firewire Hard Drive?

Can I set up an external firewire hard drive as an emergency boot drive, in case my internal drive goes south? Anyone have utility software recommendations for setting up boot drive or mirror drive, in addition to OS X's Disk Utility? Thanks.

Photon2:
Yes, you can set up your external firewire HDD as an emergency boot drive.
Here's what you need to do:
1. Your HDD must be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2. (Optional) I suggest you partition your HDD so that the first partition is roughly equivalent to the size of your internal HDD. The rest can be partitioned for other uses. (See Dr. Smoke's FAQ Backup and Recovery) For step-by-step for formatting and partitioning please post back).
3. Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your internal HDD to the external firewire HDD/partition.
Please post back with further questions or comments.
Cheers
cornelius

Install XP on External FireWire Hard Drive

Can someone help me install Windows XP onto an External, FireWire, Hard Drive? I can format and partition the drive with the XP CD, but it won't install XP onto the drive.
It says something about access rights and BIOS or CMOS. I don't think Macs have either a BIOS or a CMOS. I've tried correcting disk permissions with Disk Utility, but it wouldn't do it. It probably doesn't have access.
So does any body know how to do this?

Hi Megabyte,
sad to say but Windows can not be installed to an external Firewire Harddrive.
And this is not a OSX BootCamp issue, but 'designed' by Microsoft to not be doable.
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Manual unmount Firewire hard drives before shutdown

I'm having shutdown problems again possibly due to my new firewire hard drive, the firewire driver supplied by OS X, or some combination thereof.
The issue is if I don't manually unmount my Firewire hard drive, the MacBook Pro does not ever properly shutdown and just spends its time doing the "spinning sun ray". If I manually unmount the firewire hard drives (by dragging to trash, for example) then there is no shutdown problem. Why should this be a problem at all? I don't understand. Why can't the shutdown command also unmount Firewire hard drives consistently?
My set up:
MacBook Pro <--> LaCie 120Gb firewire <--> Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500GB
I also saw this article:
http://www.fcpworld.com/fcpworld/articles/E14514A0-F957-48E4-835A-81CE505C03D5.h tml
Any times on how to solve this problem so that I can go to the shutdown command without first having to manually unmount the Firewire hard drives? Thanks!

Frank Canzolino wrote:
Thanks for reporting back, the idea was just a theory that I had never tried before. I do know that Macs will have difficulty shutting down if the state of a network is changed during to shutdown, say pulling the ethernet cable. Firewire has been implemented as a network port (actually a while ago).
Yeah, I've known Firewire was implemented as a network port a long time ago. The strange thing is that I'm not using the Firewire port as a network device AND it has also been deactivated. It was deleting the port that seemed to have helped it.

External Cardbus Firewire Hard drive Wallstreet

I have a Wallstreet G3 upgraded to a G4.
I have a cardbus IE1394 Firewire
I want to add an external firewire hard drive. I have to have one with it's own power supply, correct?
How large a drive can I get?
What rpm?
Has anyone had any success with such a setup on the Wallstreet?
I am in System 9.2.2. That is why I want the external - to remove all my files to the external drive and reformat my internal hard drive and add system 10 to my internal.
What problems do you forsee?
Any help will be gratefully considered.
Gayle in Saginaw, MI

Gayle,
A FireWire card works just fine in a Wallstreet in both 9.x and 10.x, and yes, you will want a FW HD with its own power supply. You can also use any size FW HD...there is no limitation. I would not spend a lot of money on the fastest drive since I don't believe you are editing video, etc, where speed is mandatory.
Please be aware that you cannot boot to an external drive through a FireWire PC card, only through built-in FireWire ports.
You will need to add the three FireWire extensions to your OS 9.2.2:
FireWire CardBus Enabler 1.0.1
FireWire Enabler 2.8.5
FireWire Support 2.8.5
The above are the latest versions in 9.2.2 running on my Wallstreet. Since you are running 9.2.2, the easiest way to get the latest versions is this: Insert the FireWire PC card in the PCMCIA/CardBus slot; you should see a generic PC card icon on the desktop. Now launch your MacOS 9.2.2 Update and run it on top of your installed 9.2.2. The installer will "see" your FireWire hardware and install the two extensions it has, FW Enabler and FW Support.
The third necessary extension, FireWire CardBus Enabler 1.0.1, can be had by downloading "FireWire 2.5" here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58642
You will have to run the FireWire 2.5 Installer; then you can drag the older versions of FireWire Enabler and Support out of the Extensions folder, leaving just the FireWire CardBus Enabler extension. Now you can run the MacOS 9.2.2 Update (with the FW PC card inserted) and get the other two extensions.
Regarding OSX:
- What version do you want to run? The Wallstreet natively supports up to 10.2.8, and higher using XPostFacto.
- What is the size of your internal HD?
- How much built-in RAM do you have?

External firewire hard drive and iMovie

I want to use an external firewire hard drive to save my iMovie files on while I work on them. Is there any where I can go to congfigure, or should it just work? I've been trying it, and iMovie will sometimes crash. Is there a way around this?
Thanks

From the SoftRAID manual:
Fire hubs and disk drives. FireWire hubs are notorious for introducing errors and instability onto the bus.
Make sure that all of your consumer electronic devices (iSight, cameras, scanners) are connected to a separate FW bus. These devices are not built to the same standards as storage devices and known for introducing errors onto a FW bus.
Cables. While most cables work fine with a single device, many cables will introduce errors when 2 or more disks are connected to the bus.
http://www.softraid.com
http://www.softraid.com/demo.html - manual and demo
Output can be to any drive or partition. When you lauch iMovie it asks where to store your project.
I just bought a camera, and curious myself to see if I can take 10 minute clips and use iMovie/iDVD so that it will auto-play. I may end up buying Pogue's "iMovie Missing Manual" or something.
iMovie Discussions

Using an external firewire hard drive + interface at the same time?

Hi Guys,
It seems that the issues I am having with BFD2 not streaming properly might be to do with the slow USB transfer rate. (Thanks to everyone who has helped with this issue!)
So... I am thinking of getting an external firewire hard drive for my iMac.
Thing is, my audio interface also uses firewire (Mackie Onyx 1220)... can they share using a hub? Will one slow the other down? What if I also run another hard drive on firewire for my audio, will two FW drives and the audio interface all be able to share the one firewire port using a hub?
At the moment, all my drives have their own direct USB port, is going to shared firewire a step forward or a step backwards?
Cheers and thanks,
Mike

Gorwel Owen1 wrote:
On my G4 (roughly 30 % the power of your MBP)
Is this with an external drive and interface?
No Interface (yes, I use built in audio), but that shouldn't make a difference in CPU use.
I have four Internal drives. But that shouldn't make a difference either
That is very dependent on what you put on these tracks
I was thinking mainly about recording i.e. 8 simultaneous tracks whilst playing back up to about 16. I generally avoid plug-ins until mixing anyway. Sounds like I should be OK.
Absolutely.
but when logic overloads (when the CPU can't process audio in realtime anymore) Logic simply stops playback.
When I tried using a drive and interface on the same bus a few years ago I experienced minor glitching rather than stopping. Perhaps Logic has been improved in this respect.
P.S. How do you 'quote'in the forum?
Just above the field where you type replies in, there are 5 symbols - they are buttons.
The first three work on selected text (making it Bold, Italic and Underlined). The abc-tick is spell-checking and the " sign means Quote. When you click it, the message you reply to is inserted wherever your cursor is.
The preview tab lets you see how the message will look, giving an opportunity to edit. You cannot edit in preview mode though, just look. Only in Compose can you edit.

Logic Board or Hard Drive Issue?

Recently my PowerBook G4 failed to boot from the internal hard drive. Gray Apple screen, spinning wheel and after a couple of minutes restart is all I get. What happened initially was the computer froze not allowing Safari to quit for restart. I had to manually shut down after all other means did not work (Force Quit, etc.). I have been able to get it to boot from an external Firewire drive running 10.4, but it will not recognize a USB drive, though the USB ports work for a printer and scanner. I was also able to get it to boot from a 10.5 Install DVD that came with my wife's MacBook. Since I bought this PowerBook used, it had no disks included, but did have 10.5 installed. The other thing is the lower RAM slot has not worked from the day I got it. When I run Disk Utility the drive checks out, though there were some Permission repairs. SMART checks verified. I seem to be able to access the internal disk when booted from the external. Reset PMU & PRAM, no difference. Should I try replacing the hard drive or do I have another issue here?

First up, PowerPC-based Macs can't boot up from a USB external drive (per se... there is a workaround and "hack"). Only Intel-based Macs can do that.
Second, since you say it works and boots up when connected to a FireWire external drive, I believe it is a hard drive issue. S.M.A.R.T. status is not ("not") always a reliable indicator from what I've heard. It may say it's verified, but really it's failing. By the same token, it may say failed, but really it's fine.
That is not always the case however. 95% of the time, S.M.A.R.T. status is highly accurate.
If you are so inclined, you can open up your PowerBook, take out the hard drive, and place a new one in there and see what happens. If it works, you're in business. And you only spent a $100 or less on a new drive (which you might end up needing anyway if your current drive is indeed broken).
(If your drive isn't broken, then you have a backup drive ).
If the new drive installed doesn't work, then it is a logic board issue or something else. But since you say it works fine and boots up from a Leopard install DVD, I think it may just be the hard drive. And a new logic board usually starts at $300 so think about that as well. (You could get a new used one for a bit more and sell that one for parts).

External Firewire hard drive won't mount after 10.4.10 update

I see many posts about USB drives not mounting after 10.4.10 update. Just lending my voice to that issue (my USB drive won't work either) as well as the 10.4.10 update breaking Firewire drives.
Hope a fix is coming. No backups are scaaaary.

How to fix the problem of a missing external Hard Drive (Firewire) after it vanishes from you desktop after installing 10.4.10 update.
I have a iMac PPC (Non intel). Aparently my system upated installed the wrong version of 10.4.10 and thus my external firewire hard drives a 320 GB Westerndigital My Book, and Acomdata 80 GB, and aWestern Digital 160 GB media center all vanished from the desktop.
The instructions below should be credited to several different people. I found various version of these steps in the Discussion. I combines a few of them into this one 10 step fix and it worked for me. I hope it works for you.
1) Shut down you computer
2) Unplug all peripherals (i.e USB and Firewire, I left computer power plug in as well as ethernet and Keyboard+ Mouse) and leave along for 30 Minutes
3) Restart holding down the Command (Apple) + Option + P + R keys for three startup bongs, then release the keys and your computer will start up as usual.
4) Verify and repair disk Permission using Disk Utility. (Several things were repaired here)
5) Instal 10.4.10 Combo PPC
6) Restart Again
7) Again repair Disk permissions (None of mine needed to be repaired fyi this time)
8) Unplug Power cable and Firewire cable from External Hard Drive (leave along for 1 minute)
9) Reconnect power to Firewire External Drive first then the Firewire cable to the drive second, then the firewire cable from the Drive to the computer last.
10) Turn on your Firewire Drive... you will head it spin up and eventually show up on your desktop just like it did before the 10.4.10 update.

ISight Firewire Hard Drive issues? Anyone?

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