MBP firewire port bus issue?

i've got an 2.16 dual intel 17" MBP. running 10.4.8. i'm using Final Cut Pro 5.1.1. I've been running my media off a maxtor 500gb external connected via the 800 port. i've got two 250gb externals daisy-chained and connected to the 400 for my sfx. i've had my mini-dv camera attached via a 4-6 pin to the 400 port on the back of the maxtor media drive for digitizing. i recently did a couple updates (security something or others) via the software update panel on the mac. i went to capture some footage i needed off a tape the other day and upon connecting my camera, all the drives unmounted and i was greeted by the device removed error pop-up. i've tried new cable, i tried unplugging all but the one maxtor drive, i tried just having that drive plugged into the 800 and the camera into the 400 port of the computer. i've tried a new camera.....no avail in any case. if i have the camera plugged in, i've got no external drives on line.
did any of my software updates
potentially screw up bus assignment?? i'm frustrated. please help.

I am a little behind on the technical speak but I recently upgraded to a 2.16 dual intel 17 MBP and have been having problems with Firewire connectivity; I had a simple set up; External 160GB drive connects ok via FW 4OO port but when i connect my DV camera via Firefire 800 port (9pin to 4pin) the mac doesn't see my camera - if i go back to capturing video to internal hard drive and using FW 400 port to connect to DV all is ok - Is it in simple language the case that the MBP can't support both FW connections without upgrading some FW express card? If that's the case two of those dudes in tee shirts in the apple store london have been telling porkies? Any help here?
macbook pro 17 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Similar Messages

Need advice on how to get the MBP firewire port to like... work ?

Bonjour, from France !
Ok my firewire port does work when it has to mount a drive.
But it really makes the biggest mess in the universe when it comes down to streaming audio data to my external firewire sound card, a t.c. electronic konnekt 8. Ok ok I see you guys comming with the "read the notice of your soundcard you idiot" answers ! But it's not just me. My brother has a firewire m-audio audio interface on his intel iMac (first generation) and he is having the same mess, and a friend also had another m-audio firewire model and had the same problems. Of course, drivers are up to date.
The problems are : mainly random clicks and sound gaps when playing audio, sometimes lasting a few seconds - sometimes loss of synchronisation leading to strong sound degradation.
So my question is : this issue is obviously a general (mac ?) firewire related issue as several configurations have experienced it. Does anyone out there know how i could fix it ?
Thanx for your time,
Michael
Message was edited by: Leberger Jacob

ok topic to be continued here :
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1195328&stqc=true
(mod may close this one if u like )

2006 MBP firewire 400/800 issues

has anyone heard of this issue before? I have a late 2006 mbp 2.16 intel core duo 17 inch laptop. I have decided to move my itunes library onto a portable 1 tb maxtor firewire 800 hard drive. Everything is mapped correctly yet when i fire up itunes, there is a loud buzzing sound coming from the speakers. You can hear the hard drive spinning and what sounds like the computer trying to access files.
any help would be greatly appreciated
B

Hi briantriniti-
Yes, I have heard of this happening with external drives. Seagate external firewire drives are notorious for this phenomena. Any drive with a plastic case will tend to produce more noise.
There are things you can try to do to mitigate the noise, but most likely it will always be there. One thing to do is use a high-quality cable with ferrite "beads" on both ends.
In my studio, I switch off the noisy drives when doing audio work.
Luck-
-DP

MBP FireWire 800 bus has corrupted 3 drives

Hello,
I have been working with a friend on a recording of their band. We recorded a 24 track Pro Tools 9 session of their latest show. Everything has been working flawlessly until last night.
I received a frantic call from my buddy yesterday telling me that his buss powered FW drive all of a sudden unmounted and now is unrecognizable by the system. When he plugs it in to the 800 port it powers up and is recognized by the system but says that it needs to be formatted. We checked it in disk utility but it says the drive is corrupted and cannot be repaired.
In an effort to recover the un-backed-up audio data he bought Pro Soft's disk recovery software. It was able to see the data on the drive so he started the recovery process. about 5 hours or so into the process the destination disk unmounted and is now unrecognizable by the system. Same error, the disk needs to be initialized and disk utility is unable to repair the problem.
Unfortunately he also hooked up his backup drive to the system and it became corrupted it as well after a few hours. (Not my suggestion).
Long story longer... We now have 3 drives that are full of data but cannot be recognized by any system. He tried mounting them on his girlfriends old Power-book but gets the same error. We also took the drives that have USB and hooked them up via USB but still have the same error.
I think he is going to have to send in the computer to apple care but I thought I would ask if anyone has any suggestions.
He has a newer MBP Core 2 Duo running 10.6.4
THANK YOU!

You may have overloaded the port, following the instructions below it should reset:
+1. Shut down the computer.+
+2. Disconnect all devices and all other cables, except the keyboard and mouse cable(s).+
+3. Disconnect the computer from the power outlet and wait for 3 to 5 minutes.+
+4. Plug the computer back in and turn it on.+
+5. Reconnect the device(s) (one at a time if there is more than one) and test. Test with each port if you have more than one.+
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1317?viewlocale=en_US

Firewire Bus Issue

I have a I Mac G5 with 10.3.9 installed and I have had the computer for about 1 and a half years. I have daisy chained three maxtor drives which I okayed with apple support--I wanted to make sure this computer could handle the three drives, and a video converter. About two months I bought the LaCie dvd burner and have to swap firewire ports with the Sony Converter when I want to burn discs.
Everything has worked just fine until about two weeks ago when i couldn't boot up the computer. I took it into an Apple Store thinking it might be related to a power problem I had about 9 months ago. After a two hour diagonostic was run twice on the machine the support people could find nothing wrong with the computer.
It also started up fine without the firewire ports being used and I didn't recognize that this must be the problem at that time.
The next morning, with the firewire cables plugged in directly to the back of the computer it wouldn't start, so I shut down, unplugged everything, waited a few moments and then plugged the processor back in. It started right up.
Now, I understand what's wrong, but don't know how to fix it. When the unit doesn't start up, as it didn't a few nights ago after I burned a dvd, I shut down and unplug the firewire cable and then reboot. I then can plug in the Maxtor drives, etc., and the processor works fine.
So, it seems to be a start up issue with the fire wire bus or whatever.
Does anyone know what I can do to fix this and get things back to the way they used to be?
I don't want to upgrade to Tiger because I have apps that won't work with Tiger and I don't want to upgrade them at present either.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
By the way, I use the external drives for my film shorts.
Lucin

This is Apple's article -
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88338
FireWire ports can (or use to) get "fried" (99% of
the first FW Mac, Blue G3 users had to eventually
invest in PCI FW controller as ports would just stop
working).
I would invest in PCI FW800/400 rather than
daisy-chain and so you have two buses (all the FW
ports share one common bus).
A powered hub has its own a/c.
There use to be more talk about using "isolator FW
cables" to prevent hot-plugging from causing
electrical damage to FW ports.
I am not a fan of most of the vendor supplied FW
cases (Maxtor, WD, etc) and just go with a good
Oxford based unit (FW bridge type) which are more mac
friendly and work. Or even eSATA for hard drives
(SeriTek etc) which allows each drive to be on its
own channel.
Hi,
Thanks for the imput. What do you mean that the powered hub has it's own a/c? I'm confused.
Next time I get a drive I may go with the Oxford based, altho' I have to say that the Maxtor Drives have been very reliable so far.
As for the controller, I have to see if I can get one for the IMac. I got a PCI card for my G4 and that was a help.
I'll check out this article. Actually, I've already read this.
When I took the machine to the apple store they checked my firewire ports. They checked everything and they said when I called today that the ports were not fried, that they were okay.
My question is: why would the computer boot up when I unplug the fire wire cable and not boot up when I don't? this is a new development and I've been fine with this machine for over a year.

PCIe G5s- are their firewire ports all on the same bus?

Sorry, posted this on the G5 expansion forum but never got a response. I've been looking but haven't found an answer to this. I know it was a major issue to some people that the old G5s had all their firewire ports on the same bus. I was just hoping that Apple had fixed this so I wouldn't need to use up an extra PCIe slot with a firewire card.
So, does anyone have an answer? Thanks ahead of time for any info!

Patrick:
Nope. My understanding of the FW spec is that devices slow down anything after themselves in the chain to their speed or lower. Thus, since the FW800 port isn't after the FW400 ones, the FW400 ones don't slow it down.
<
And in this corner, Brian:
<div class="jive-quote">Yes, and connecting a DV VCR or camcorder will pull everything down to 100Mbps. This is the reason some systems have dropped frame problems on capture and output to tape.< </div>
While these sound like complementary posts, the confusion is already palpating through this thread. Someone please clarify this for the rest of us. Suggest you use a standard example that includes a hi-speed FW drive, a standard FW drive and a DV deck. Hook them up in the same order to the two ports and tell us what the effects are on the performance of the Firewire bus.
At the present time, there are no PCIe firewire cards. < </div>
I had no idea.
Isn't that just weird? This is the 21st century! Why is there a new data bus structure in our Macintosh without any accessory cards?
bogiesan

USB/FireWire Ports Issue

So before I go into the apple store and ask for this computer to be repaired/replaced, I would like to see if anyone knows if something can be done about this issue I have pinpointed..
Basically when I have more than a few USB/FireWire ports connected, one or more of the devices does not function properly. This has happened with two external hard drives - which should have no problem being connected simultaneously.. When I try to eject one of them, I receive a message stating that it cannot be ejected because one or more programs may be using it.. although all programs are closed, causing me to have to force eject..
Also, I plug in one drive and open the other in finder to back it up, and all of the folders in the drive are suddenly empty.. nothing inside. I go to Get Info.. Zero KB.. I try ejecting, but receive the same message, so I force eject, plug it back in, and wala, all the files are back in the right place..
This has also happened in the past when my cinema display and a printer were plugged in simultaneously.. the computer won't detect the USB of the cinema display -- which only means that the speakers of the display won't work + no brightness control from the keyboard.. so i let it slide.. but now with this external hard drive issue, i need to solve the problem..
Thank you for reading..

Same here. Since a few weeks, my MacPro ejects USB HDD's as soon as I write or read data on it.
(no I haven't installed something new at this time and all HUB's and HDD's have their own power supply, and yes they have been exchanged, so its not a broken cable or so !!!!!!!!)
After a reset of the NVRAM and PRAM its better for an hour or so, then starts to eject again. I've seen a lot of communities with exact the same question, but never a solution for it. There is also nothing in the support tab of apple.
Hope someone here can help me out or due to the fact that this is a AplleSupportCommunity, a Apple-Employee may starts to do his job and help this huge amount (I guess there are hundrets or tousand) of mac-user with exact the same problem....
btw: don't agree with MACATTACK2010 that this is a hardware problem, cause there are a lot of people in the
net that ask the same question with brandnew Hardware. I think it's an OS or an Update Bug, or may both.

Can I run an HDMI monitor from the Firewire port of my MBP?

This may be a strange one
I am running a late 2011 17" MBP running Mavericks (latest version as of July 2014).
Currently I have a 4TB external thunderbolt drive attached. There is no thru port.
My challenge is, I want to connect an external HDMI monitor, but this MBP only has the one Thunderbolt port, being used by the external drive.
My hope is, that somehow, I might be able to MacGyver something using the Firewire port since I cannot afford another monitor with a TB through at the moment....Technically the cabling would be possible, albeit a bit freakish.
Something like:
Firewire cable out from MBP, plugged into a FW to Thunderbolt converter, thunderbolt converter tip plugged into a MiniDisplayPort to HDMI converter box (like the Monoprice MMP-MDP2H01), then from there to the HDMI monitor.
Would the MBP detect the monitor and route the video signal through the FW port accordingly?
Looking forward to some expert advice and any zany workaround suggestions you all might have!
Respect.

The MDP to HDMI will work fine.
Captfred

Issue Using both Firewire Ports on 24" iMac

I just got a new 24" iMac with the 3.06 processor. I intend to use it with Pro Tools and other music making software. I have an audio interface that is firewire only and an external hard drive (where I store my audio files) that is both firewire and USB. The problem is that I when I use both firewire ports (800 and 400) at the same time, my Pro Tools starts acting up. And I found one post stating that this was a known issue with the 24". But that was back in May and I thought it would have been resolved by now. Anyway, when I use the USB port on my hard drive instead of the firewire, everything works. Also, on my 17" iMac PPC G5 everything works just fine on there, including using both firewire ports a the same time. Finally, I've got the latest updates on all devices involved. Has anyone experienced this problem or have any knowledge of it? Thanks in advance.

I've got a similar problem. I've got a WD external drive connected via FW800 and an Mbox pro 2 audio interface connected via FW400 to my 24" mid 2007 iMac. They both power on (the mbox gets it's power from the iMac) and are recognised by the iMac. However, the WD drive seems to take dominance at some point during start up. The reason I know this is because I was watching the LED on the Mbox light up as I sent it signal from the guitar and then it suddenly stopped lighting up. I tried daisy chaining the mbox to the WD but outcome was the same. Then tried chaining the WD drive to the Mbox (this meant the WD drive was now down to FW400 speed). It worked!!!.............until the next time I started up the computer. The WD drive wasn't recognised by the iMac.
I'm not impressed with the iMac's inability to deal with devices from both it's ports. Why put them on the machine if they can't handle it?
I bought the WD drive to work at FW800 speed and don't want to have to submit to USB 2.0 if I can help it.
Any suggestions welcome.
Thanks

MBP firewire 400, external HD issues...

Hi all.
My MacBook Pro has given me nothing but trouble since I bought it this summer. The firewire ports have gone dead twice -- AND I have had four external hard drives die on me (and I've always ejected them before unplugging/powering down).
Often drives that will mount on other computers will not mount on this computer. And just now, I had one drive that I managed to mount through the fw800 port with a firewire 400/800 cable -- but my computer froze up during a restart -- the fan started whirring like it was going to shake the computer apart. I forced the computer to restart (again) and now my external HD's firewire ports are dead (to two different computers I tried). Fortunately it also has a USB2 port.
The Apple store has attempted to fix my computer on a few different occasions -- and with only limited success. That is, they got my firewire port to work for a couple of weeks.
Anyone else having issues like this? I am convinced there is something electrical going on in this particular computer that is frying ports both in the computer and in external HDs, but am having trouble convincing Apple of this.
Suggestions?
Thanks,
Todd

hmm ya thats not right, i would go back or call apple and try to get it fixed/replaced.
something has to have a short or something wrong with it. i think i remember someone saying that their SMC has to get swapped when they had the same or a similar issue but i cant say for sure
-matt
Message was edited by: mattathayde

Extra Firewire Port on MacBook Pro - 2nd Bus for FCP??

I have a 3-month old MacBook Pro with 2 firewire ports - one is a 6 pin 400 port and the other is a 9-pin 800 port. Can the 800 port be used for an external firewire drive for Final Cut Pro if the 400 port is taken by an AJA Io LD? I've read that it's best to have a 2nd bus via a ExpressCard34, but it seems that's normally the answer for laptops that have only one firewire port. Can this 800 port be used with no problems? Is the 800 on a 2nd bus?
Thanks in advance,
Eddie

I've moved to a G-Sata,via express card adapter,in combination with the Io LD,but to be honest the Io and a fw800 G-Raid didn't drop frames for me in uncompressed SD.
Regards,
Will.
MacBook Pro 17" Mac OS X (10.4.8) FCP 5.1.2
MacBook Pro 17" Mac OS X (10.4.8) FCP 5.1.2

Firewire ports causing "initilaized drive" issues?

So this is now the second time this has happened to me, and since it was with a 4 day old drive I'm a little concerned (especially as it was used to recover files from ANOTHER drive that got erased...)
i just plugging in my new Western Digital 1tb Mybook Studio external drive using the FW800 and got a message saying "unable to recognize drive, initialize, cancel" etc.
Because it was new, i just hit cancel (glad I did...)
Plugged it in again, and all was fine. This had happened before a few months back with another drive only using the FW400 port.
Is there something WRONG with my Firewire ports that could be causing this? I've NEVER had an issue with USB (but these are scratch discs for video so they need to be FW). Im really concerned that this could fry my drive... which would be bad. cause i have a lot of important data on these suckers.
any ideas?

You are not alone....
My attention grabber:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1917005&tstart=0
main thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1910899&tstart=0

My Firewire port is not working: Is that a Hardware or Software issue? any suggestions?

Greetings Everybody,
I bought this Imac to use it only with audio applications and now I can't use my UAD -2 Duo Satellite because MAC OS tells me that "
No FireWire ports were found" Does any know how to deal with this problem?
Thanks in advance

USB and Firewire information:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1151?viewlocale=en_US
USB:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4049?viewlocale=en_US
Firewire Port failure:
http://www.wiebetech.com/whitepapers/FireWirePortFailures.php

How to fix a lack of enough firewire ports issue?

I am using garageband with an Alesis iO14 audio interface. Just bought a Liquid Mix 16 with a firewire connector. Am having trouble with the Liquid Mix after installation. The mfr. says I should not daisy chain the two. They recommend a firewire expansion card. Is this even possible with the mini? any advice on how I can fix this? I really want to use this Liquid Mix. Thanks.

You are out of luck. This is so annoying. I just don't understand why Apple can not give most of their machines not only two firewire ports, but two independent busses as well. This is not a luxury in my opinion. The only machine in their entire product lineup what allows for expansion of firewire busses/ports is the giant Mac Pro. Mac computers are used in so darn many professional industries that depend on not only fast harddrive interfaces, but interfaces of various kinds that need a dedicated high speed buss. Pro machines should feature pro inputs and outputs. They've even taken the ExpressCard interface away from all but one laptop. What's next? Maybe they should just remove the USB ports too and assume that we all love wireless keyboard/mice/card readers/printers...it's insanity.
You are supposed to be able to daisy chain an enormous amount of firewire devices, but in reality, that just does not work all the time. I too had all kinds of problems chaining a MOTU 828mkII and one single harddrive on one FW buss. No matter of changing order of hooking them up, to which one to turn on first had any effect. They both wanted more than the single buss could give.
I'd return the LiquidMix if you can...the only mac in the current line that I can honestly call Pro is the Mac Pro tower. The others just don't have pro or even semi-pro in/out anymore.
It's almost like Apple really likes to not give us pro's what we really need. Close, but not quite. Imagine a macbook pro with two firewire busses? WOW! The audio and video crowd would go crazy for them. Imagine they also put back expresscard slots on all laptops in the Pro line? You could have 3 separate input busses for harddrives, cameras, audio interfaces, etc. Now that would be pro.

Firewire Port Issue

Hi everyone. I'm a mac person in training and have a question about a machine that I am working on. I had a customer that had a bad front panel board on their G5. Everytime I plugged a usb or firewire device into them nothing would happen. I replaced the front panel board and tested the ports before returning the system back to the user. After I reinstalled the machine onsite, I plugged the users Firewire drive into the front panel board and attempted an Option Boot but only their internal drive would show.
I then unplugged the customers cinema display firewire plug from the back of the system, plugged their firewire drive into the back port and tried Option boot again. This time the drive was found. Out of kicks I tried it again in the front port and it worked there. As soon as I plugged the Cinema displays plug back into the back firewire port, option boot could not find the firewire drive again.
Any suggestions?

irishpunk-
Yup. Happens all of the time.
The FireWire hub located in the monitor is bad. If the monitor is under warranty it can be fixed that way.
I am not a fan of combined devices, as when something like this happens you lose the use of the monitor while the 4 dollar hub is repaired.
Luck-
-DaddyPaycheck

MBP firewire port bus issue?

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