Mounting external firewire drive

I have two lacie firewire 500gb drives, daisy chained, and connected to the firewire 800 port in the back of the computer. When I turn on the MacPro the drives would turn on and mount (and shut down when the computer shut down), which is exactly what I want, but recently I had to take my computer to the shop to get something fixed and now when I turn on the computer I have to manually turn on and off the drives. I tried connecting them before and after the computer was turned on to see if it would make a difference and it didn't.
Nothing is different with any of the connections or settings. Is there a trick to getting the drives to turn on and off when the computer turns on and off?
Thanks,
Steve

What was fixed? You might want to try resetting PRAM and NVRAM…
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

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Can't mount external firewire drive on MacBook Pro

I cannot get my OWC 1.5TB Serial ATA hard drive to mount any longer. What is the best mounter utility for the following Macbook Pro running 10.6.8:
Hardware Overview:
Model Name:    MacBook Pro
Model Identifier:    MacBookPro8,2
Processor Name:    Intel Core i7
Processor Speed:    2.2 GHz
Number of Processors:    1
Total Number of Cores:    4
L2 Cache (per Core):    256 KB
L3 Cache:    6 MB
Memory:    8 GB
Boot ROM Version:    MBP81.0047.B27
SMC Version (system):    1.69f4
Serial Number (system):    C02FM3P5DF91
Hardware UUID:    C54FEEE5-027E-5359-AF8D-819D80AE37EF
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State:    Enabled

If Disk Utility is seeing the drive, maybe your Finder Preferences just aren't set to show external drives on the Desktop?
When you 'see' it in Disk Utility, how is the drive formatted?
Clinton

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...

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

External Firewire Drives Don't Mount.... i need a guru.

Warning!!!!!
i'm going to ramble....
2 much sake .. heh heh
i just got a brand butt spanking new iBook G4 14" 1.42 GHz
Tiger pre-installed.
I ran Software Update. As you can tell by my info, i'm at 10.4.2 now.
In a minute i'll tell ya how i got BACK to 10.4.2 from 10.4.5
When i got my iBook I didn't plug my external firewire drives in until (about 2 days) after my update. So when i did get around to building my iTunes library, well, no luck.
My firewire drives would and do NOT mount!
By the way these particular peripherals are Western Digital firewire
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?p_faqid=694&pcreated=1036793224
and AcomData Combo USB 2.0/Firewire
http://www.acomdata.com/hdp/fs.html
drives.
With a little exploration you'll find (at least i did) that they do not have firmware or driver updates for Mac. ( if you find them i'll give ya praise!)
The AcomData drive mounts with USB but not with firewire. The thing that
creeps me out is that my 3rd Gen firewire enabled iPod mounts right up no prob!
Another thing that ties me in knots is that these drives WILL MOUNT on my iBook12" running 10.3.9, as well as my old 5cH00L iMac DV 10.3.9!!!!
I thought it might be the Update so i did a clean install with the dvd provided by Apple and now i'm back to 10.4.2 but still no luck.
I've tried repairing permissions, starting, restarting, rebooting, plugging, unplugging, Updating, Downgrading, standing on my bloody head, looking all over the dotcom.
i swear i did all this with my peripherals unplugged.
i caught wind that though these companies may not provide updates for Mac, if i were to find out the companies that make the "chipsets?" within these drives that i might have luck.
i can't figure out what kind of "chipsets" (Oxford?) are in these drives or what to do if i knew anyway!
exhale
i still believe i have the best machine on the planet right now but .......
i need a guru.
help.
much obliged,
Clive
 G4 iBooks. iMac DV (graphite). gen 2,3,5 iPods Linux on the Pod too! Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Hi, Clive.
Here is some general troubleshooting advice that may help:
(1) Review the AppleCare Knowledge Base document "What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire device".
(2) If this problem occurred after installing a recent Mac OS X Update, and you are also unable to mount CDs, DVDs, or disk images perform the steps in this Mac OS X Hints article.
(3) The following additional steps will often help resolve problems with FireWire devices, particularly hard drives:(a) Power-on the FireWire drive before starting up (booting) your Mac.
(b) Reset PRAM and NVRAM.
(c) Reset the PMU or SMU: In the case of your iBook, I believe the article you want is "Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)." You can also check the manual that came with your new iBook.
(d) Try a different FireWire port. James Wiebe, CEO of WiebeTech, has published FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices, a white paper providing backgroud information and technical analysis concerning the causes of failure for FireWire ports. This may provide additional diagnostic information.Note that some of the information above is from the "FireWire Problems" chapter of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X.
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.

External Firewire Drive not Mounting

Hi, I've been searching these forums but can't find an aswer to my question. I just got a new 27" iMac, and purchased a Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter. I have 3 external Firewire drives, two of which are DC powered (the third, I understand, might be a lost cause, as it's bus powered, and I gather the bus power from TB won't power Firewire drives). At any rate, I'm not seeing either of the DC powered drives showing up, which is a big concern as I have about 5TB of stuff on them!
Any reason these wouldn't show up, either in the Finder or Disk Utility? Much thanks for any help!

Hi - did you ever resolve the dropouts? I have a new iMac purchased in Q1 2014 and connect my G-Grive to it via the Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter. My iMac runs 24x7 and this connection drops out on a regular basis - I'd say maybe once every week or so. I have a slightly newer USB3 G-Drive which is connected by the USB socket next to the TB socket on my iMac.
I cannot tell if it is a software issue or a physical (cable movement issue), the plug has never been out and I can't deliberately disconnect it at will by wobbling the cable/plug. So, evidence and experimentation suggests the physical connection is not the issue. This problem has only come about after switching from a physical FW800 connection (my old iMac) to working via a TB adaptor (my new iMac).

External Firewire drive not Mounting/Appearing!

I have a White macbook core duo and when I plug in the External Firewire Drive it doesn't appear anymore! The Drive draws power from the computer still yet the computer cannot detect the drive. I addition the when i ran Disk Utility the program did not load completely till i removed the firewire drive. I have a SmartDisk "FireLite" FireWire Drive (40gb.) Help PLEASE!!!!
Message was edited by: slverice

I had this problem too with my G5 (PPC) and brand new Mac Book.
Both of my computers were given the same local subnet address. To change this go to System Preferences > Sharing > Computer Name, you'll see an "Edit" button, click on it and change the name or add a "2" to the end of the name before ".local"
I guess what is happening is both computers are using the same local subnet and your macbook isn't being recognized.
Mine works fine now, hope this has helped you!
Jay

External Firewire Drive Has Now Showing mounting with Intilize

i have a seagate 1tb external firewire drive. its been working and has about 500gigs of info on it. today it is showing up as a unformatted drive. disk warrior is not seeing it. is there another program that could repair maybe tech tool or any other suggestions
thanks

If Disk Warrior won't see it.....ouch.
Data Rescue II is good, but again, if DW won't see, it might be toast, sorry.
As well, here is Apple doc.#88338 on getting FireWire to work.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1317?viewlocale=en_US
...perhaps it is a bus issue and the drive itself is ok. Do you have another computer/cable etc. to test it with...

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!

External Firewire Drives Not Working...huh!?!?!?

last night, everything was fine...
this morning, my two external firewire drives don't work. one is an acomdata, and the other is a western digital. neither drive will mount on any of my four macs (powerbook g4, two powermac g4s, and an ibook g3).
like i said, last night both drives worked fine...today (just a few hours later), neither of them work. any ideas?

just upgraded to 10.4.10...still nothing. i don't get it, but i really need the contents of these drives. what could have happened while i was sleeping? all four computers and both drives were turned off over night...man.

10.4.4 corrupts external Firewire drives

I had now twice corruption with external firewire drives after a hardreset (not normal shutdown, but holding the powerbutton until the mac turns off).
The first time I was forced to do this, because the whole Mac froze after a program run (not from Apple). At that time I had two external FW harddisks. One older 200GB Maxtor and one newer 250GB Maxtor, the newer one was backup, the old one master.
Because at that time I thought the old harddisk might be bad, I bought another 250GB Maxtor same as the backup drive and synced (with rsync on the terminal) all data there. I tried to recover data before that, but Disk Utility completly failed, it just ejected the disk, same with DiskWarrior.
Now, after another hard reset (Suddenly all programs locked up, and I couldn't do anything else) I had two corrupted. both the 250GB backup and the 250GB new master.
Again Disk Utility failed, although it didn't eject the disk. DiskWarrior also failed to do anything. After I tried to repair it diskwarriro said it had an error. Then I could repair it with Disk Utility, but the luck was short. soon after I couldn't read some files, and then again I had the same errors on both disks.
Right now I sync all my data from my master disk to the old 200GB Maxtor (which I reformated in between).
I am just really scared if all hard resets will corrupt my external FW harddisks. I rely on them as I only have 40GB internal data. And what good does a backup do, if it also gets corrupted.
Anybody with similar problems?
Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Yes, I have seen this twice now. It has happened to two of my external VFAT drives when used on the firewire port. The drives are in BYTECC firewire/usb chassis that use this Prolific device: 067b:3507 Prolific Technology, Inc.
The drives mount fine once, but on dismount OS X trashes the VFAT boot sector. The drive will not remount on OS X after this happens. I have one mounted now in Linux, apparently on the backup copy of the partition table. The primary is completely blown away.
The signature looks like this:
from sector offset 0 on the disk:
0x00000000 45 52 02 00 1d 38 63 80 | 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
and all zeros down to 0x200.
At 0x00000230 the ASCII string "Applepartitionmap" pops up.
I don't see why this would be a vendor's driver problem.
It's just another silly OS X firewire trick. Firewire has been a nightmare on my iMac G5, and it just keeps getting better.
This happened once at 10.4.4 and again at 10.4.5, so falling back probably won't be worth it...
Apple, have you tried regression testing the firewire disk drives? It's really uncool to detroy our data like this.
There is no valid reason to write to any drive's partition table on exit unless specifically told to do so by me via the disk utility, so stop it already.
iMac G5 20 Mac OS X (10.4)

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.

Home Folder on external firewire drive

I copied my home folder to my external firewire drive and used the Advanced Settings in Accounts to redirect the Volume path to the location of my new home folder.
All worked well for about a week and then for some reason the path to the home folder was renamed and was una ble to be accessed at login. I had to reinstall SL and then redirected the Home folder path back to the external drive. All worked OK for about a day and then the same issue arose.
It looks like SL is renaming the volume from "/Volumes/WD 4TB/minimac" to "/Volumes/WD 4TB 1/minimac".
Basically it is adding a 1 after the WD 4TB
When I try to edit the path in the Advanced Options in Accounts it still is unable to find the original volume.
To date the only way I can fix it is to do a clean install of SL and redirect the home folder to the external drive.
Any suggestion to stop the volme changing name?

drive name changing usually happens when an external drive is not unmounted cleanly or if an application tries to write to that drive when it's not there. then a phantom drive is often created. in finder go to go menu->go to folder and in the resulting popup enter /Volumes
this will open /Volumes in a finder window. that folder contains mount points for all your drives. they look like aliases. there may also be a phantom drive with the name of the external which looks like a regular folder.
this phantom drive is the problem. when finder tries to mount the external and sees that there is already something by that name in /volumes it adds 1 to the name of the mount point of the external to differentiate it from the already existing item.
delete the folder for the phantom drive form /volumes and remount the external. it will mount without 1 at the end. of course this might happen again in the future and you might have to repeat the procedure. as I said, the main reason why this happens is when a drive is not unmounted properly.
Message was edited by: V.K.

Sharing external FireWire drive between two Mac Pros

I know that sharing an external FireWire drive between two machines (i.e. both connected at the same time) is a very bad things as both will assume that they have exclusive write access to the drive and quite quickly write over what the other machine has just written.
Would it be possible though to mount the drive as read-only on the first machine and in read-write mode on the second? Would this preserve integrity as the second machine would in fact have exclusive write access or would other problems arise?
Thanks for any responses to a stupid question!
Peter

Mmm, Connect the drive to the private secure network Mac. Connect the two Macs by FireWire and create a network over the firewire connection, configure it to use class C addresses, ie. 169.x.x.x manually and then share the firewire drive to the other Mac (also on a class C network address over firewire).
Both macs will still have their own ethernet network addresses and each network will not be visible from the "other" network (unless you choose to share your internet connection over firewire).
The only caveat here is that the firewire drive will be visible to every other Mac on the secure network that you allow to connect to it (which is why I chose that one, rather than the public Mac). Or can you restrict sharing to only one network ..... didn't think so.

IMac 2.8Ghz + booting from external FireWire Drive

I was wondering if anyone has 'booted' from an external FireWire drive using the FireWire 400 port?
After going through the issue of reformatting my external drive with the GU-ID partitioning scheme, I found that the drive would mount on the FW400 port but wouldn't boot. In the end I used the FW800 port and the drive booted up first time. On my old PowerBook I could boot from both FW400 & FW800, does anyone know why FW400 doesn't work or is it my iMac?

If it mounts then you can install OSX or clone OSX and then boot from it. From what you are saying a bootable partition will boot on 400 just not on 800, which is quite odd, I concur.
Note that they are notorious for needing the right power supply and they all look identical - I had problems of recent with a triple extreme 1 TB on FW 800, and took it to LaCie (a mile from where I work) - they told me I was using the wrong power supply and gave me the right one free. When I got home I did have the right one in a pile with others. 4.2 A vs. 2.2 A and it worked great. And I have a spare free power supply.
I don't think drivers even enter into it at all with firewire, e.g. drive specific drivers.

Mounting external firewire drive

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