New external firewire HD makes my Mac freeze

It took me some time to isolate the issue but I think that I have nailed it.
Some background: Got iMac (March 2009) with Snow Leopard. Everything used to work like a charm... until I installed a firewire external HD.
I used to have (still do) an external USB HD (1 TB). Decided to get a 2TB disk for Time Machine. Chose a firewire disk to "save" on USB ports.
Ever since, when I switch from one user to another (say from me to my spouse's session) the iMac would freeze up. Not crash (well yes), but freeze right there. Needs rebooting.
Rebooting would give me the, oh no, "blue screen of death" (I know this is a Windows term, however very appropriate here too). Would need to boot up with the Terminal in single user mode (Cmd S) and run fsck and delete the application bundle file (see here http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1545?viewlocale=en_US).
I am not sure that my issue is Time Machine... but ever since I turned off my external firewire drive, I no longer have the issue.
Help !!

Yes this is definately a thing. Firewire 800 seems to cause a strange freeze. I say strange because when it would happen on my older MPB with snow leopard, I would still be able to move the cursor but it would not click. It was like an almost but not quite freeze. Then, once I disconnected the 800 drive, everything I had just tried to do while it was stuck happened, like switching applications and mouse clicks. It's like it causes a weird build-up/bottleneck that gets released.
Now it is happening on my newer iMac with Mt Lion but what happens is if I reboot, at the login screen I will have no cursor using either Magic or Mighty Mouse. Only when I unplug the Firewire 800 does the cursor suddenly appear. I have called AppleCare but they do not show it as a known issue, however it is know to us.
Apple engineers do not monitor these boards so we could be talking about something for years and unless they get notified, they'll never know it needs to be addressed. The way to let them know is through http://www.apple.com/feedback/. Every message gets read and sent to the right department. So be sure to let them know when something needs to be addressed.

Similar Messages

Snow Leopard on external firewire hard drive keeps crashing/freezing

I own a 2006 iMac that came with OS X 10.4 Tiger installed and it has always been stable and reliable. Lately I had the need to use some software that only ran on OS X Snow Leopard so I installed an external Firewire (Western Digital) 260GB hard drive and put OS X Snow Leopard on it. For the first few months, everything ran fine, but as the drive slowly filled up (or perhaps with time), my Leopard external drive started giving problems, most commonly, it would lose its Ethernet connection for no reason, or I would get a line of black/multicoloured pixels appearing across my Firefox browser (or something else weird would happen to the display), followed by the rainbow wheel spinning indefinitely... this happened more and more often, when I opened too many applications at the same time, or more than 3-4 tabs in Firefox. Occasionally the screen would "white out" or go completely black. I'd have to physically switch the computer off and on again.
However, I still have not even used 20% of the hard disk space so its not a matter of the hard drive becoming full...
The Tiger internal drive is still running 100% fine so it's not a problem with my RAM...
I've tried verifying/repairing the disk, but it doesn't show any problems. Any ideas about what I should try doing next?
Thanks in advance for any pointers.
Message was edited by: artemisworks

Just so I understand this correctly:
1. Your internal hard drive is on Tiger?
2. Your external (a WD) is on Snow Leopard?
3. Where is the "partition"? Do you have either drive partitioned?
4. You only have the problems when you are booted from/working on something using the external drive?
I've seen quite a few posts here regarding problems with external Western Digital drives; it appears that their internal drives are fine, but the externals do not play nice with Macs after a while (maybe the enclosure they use??).
In any case, if your problems are only when using the Western Digital, I'd say return it if possible, get it replaced, or buy a different brand and use the WD as a not-often-needed extra backup.

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.

HT3770 I have recently bought a external hard drive and I was told to down load a Fat 32 in order to work with my MAC/ Is this right and how do I find the download and how to install to make my new external drive compatible with my MAC?

What is a Fat 32 which I am suppose to download inorder to work on a MAC for external drive to be compatable ?

Bad advice. You do not need or want FAT.
You want GUID and Mac HFS Standard Journaling.
You don't download when you write files, or when you format or erase a drive.
General purpose Mac troubleshooting guide: Isolating issues in Mac OS X
Creating a temporary user to isolate user-specific problems: Isolating an issue by using another user account
Identifying resource hogs and other tips: Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used
Starting the computer in "safe mode": Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?
To identify potential hardware problems: Apple Hardware Test
General Mac maintenance: Tips to keep your Mac in top form

Time Machine: Repeated errors when backing up for the first time using a new external firewire drive

My Iomega 500GB firewire external drive failed on me last week and I have just replaced it with an identical model. I used to use the old drive with Time Machine on my MacBook Pro running 10.5.8 with no issues, until the drive had a hardware failure and stopped spinning up, hence the replacement.
Two days ago I tried using Time Machine for the first time with the replacement external drive. The backup failed and each subsequent backup attempt has failed since then with a different error each time. The drive cannot be ejected using Finder (Finder says disk is in use and cannot be ejected even when no processes are running except for Finder and Time Machine has been disabled), by dragging it to the dock (hangs computer which can only be fixed by a hard reboot), in Disk Utilities (drive cannot be unmounted) or in Terminal ("no such file or directory").
The first backup attempt failed after 3 hours of "preparing" with the message "The backup was not performed because an error occured while creating backup directory".
I tried repairing the disk in Disk Utilities and Disk Utilities said the drive was OK ("the volume Time Machine Backups appears to be OK"). I tried ejecting the drive (hard reboot of computer and disconnecting the drive), plugging it back in again and trying again.
This time it started backing up, then failed after a few minutes with the message "an error occured while copying files to the backup volume". I had a look at the troubleshooting suggested on http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/C3.html and followed instructions. It failed again, so I did a full reset as per http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/A4.html.
It failed again, so I tried reparing the drive again in Disk Utilities and again it said it was OK. I tried using different cables and ports (Firewire 400 instead of Firewire 800), and backups still fail.
I have turned off anti-virus scanning (Sophos). I have tried excluding it from Spotlight but this causes an error message from Spotlight. I have tried trashing the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist file and rebooting. I have tried selecting deselecting the drive as the back up in Time Machine preferences, selecting "None", then "Stop Backing Up" then quitting preferences, rebooting, disconnecting the drive, reconnecting the drive and selecting the drive again as the backup disk in Time Machine preferences. I have tried erasing the drive completely, rebooting, and trying to back up again.
None of these have worked. This is a brand new drive and I do not want to have to replace it again if I do not have to.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you.

Hello, some possible clues...
Should you click “Start New Backup”? Not yet! If you see the dialog above, your existing Time Machine backup is corrupt, and you might not be able to recover data from it. But you can save a copy of the corrupt bundle and, perhaps, extract some data from it if needed.
Ask yourself if Time Machine has saved data you might need before deciding what to do next:
If you are sure you won’t need anything backed up before today, click “Start New Backup” and let Time Machine do its thing.
Otherwise, click “Back Up Later” and save a copy before letting Time Machine start a new backup. Just look for a file called “computername.sparsebundle” (for network backups) or “Backups.backupdb” (for local ones) and create a copy with a different name. You can open sparsebundle files with DiskImageMounter and browse them like any other disk. More information is available here.
There you go. If you click “Start New Backup” when you see this dialog box, Time Machine will erase all of your old backup data and start a new bundle. It won’t be corrupt, but it will be empty.
Note that you can manually initiate a Time Machine backup integrity check by option-clicking the “Time Machine” icon in the menu bar and selecting “Verify Backups.”
http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/08/11/time-machine-completed-verification-backups- improve-reliability-time-machine-create-backup/
According to This Time Machine resource “This appears only on Snow Leopard, and started with the Time Capsule Backup Update 1.0 in mid-May of 2010. It also seems to have been included in the 10.6.3 v1.1 update and 10.6.4.”
So, what can you do about it? Grin and bear it, it seems, until Apple fixes it.
One thing you can do to make the backup take less time is to connect your machine to your Time Capsule or other backup drive via Ethernet for the duration of the initial backup.
http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/the-dreaded-time-machine-has-completed-a-verifi cation-of-your-backups-to-improve-reliability-time-machine-must-create-a-new-ba c kup-for-you-message-and-why-you-are-seeing-it/
Time Machine: About "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you."...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4076
Or a different/better solution in my experiences...
Get carbon copy cloner to make an exact copy of your old HD to the New one...
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
Or SuperDuper...
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/
Or the most expensive one & my favorite, Tri-Backup...
http://www.tri-edre.com/english/products/tribackup.html

IPod makes my mac freeze!

Hi there ive got an intel imac and an ipod (20 gigs) and when i plug it in via a firewire cable it either cuts out all the sound on my mac for about 30 seconds or freezes my mac completely... is there any reason for this and how can i help it?!
-Simon

Yes this is definately a thing. Firewire 800 seems to cause a strange freeze. I say strange because when it would happen on my older MPB with snow leopard, I would still be able to move the cursor but it would not click. It was like an almost but not quite freeze. Then, once I disconnected the 800 drive, everything I had just tried to do while it was stuck happened, like switching applications and mouse clicks. It's like it causes a weird build-up/bottleneck that gets released.
Now it is happening on my newer iMac with Mt Lion but what happens is if I reboot, at the login screen I will have no cursor using either Magic or Mighty Mouse. Only when I unplug the Firewire 800 does the cursor suddenly appear. I have called AppleCare but they do not show it as a known issue, however it is know to us.
Apple engineers do not monitor these boards so we could be talking about something for years and unless they get notified, they'll never know it needs to be addressed. The way to let them know is through http://www.apple.com/feedback/. Every message gets read and sent to the right department. So be sure to let them know when something needs to be addressed.

Mail are make my Mac freeze when Re-indexing

Hi Guys,
After upgrade to Mavericks, I realize that my Mail is not indexing well.
Sometimes I search email, and cannot found.
After browsing, I see in the Apple Websites here :
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14876
That the Mail should be re-indexing.
I follow the instruction, I have delete file Envelope* in Maildata directory.
After that I open my Mail, and it started to re-indexing.
My email was so huge, it's about 350k email to reindex.
It tooks 4 hours, and when the Mail reindexing mail 320k something, it makes my computer HANGS......
I have leave it for some hours, but still no respond, and the screen still on the last page.....
mouse and everything is not work in this stage.
I have try twice times ,and seems the same situation happen
Need help, how to solve this problem ?????

When you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above. Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first. Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough. It is never necessary or helpful to post more than about 100 lines. "The more, the better" is not the rule here.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

In disk utility, how do i format new external ssd for mac mini?

In disk utility, how do I format a new external SSD for late 2009 Mac Mini?

Format it as: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Upgrade to Yosemite, iPhoto won't open and NTFS-3G could not mount error with new external HD

Help!
I just did a software update to get OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 on my MacBook Pro.
Now iPhoto won't open and I get this error:
"Your photo library is either in use by another application or has become unreadable....Shut down and restart your computer, and then open iPhoto again. If the problem persists, try rebuilding your photo library. To do this, quit iPhoto, and then reopen it while keeping the Option and Command keys pressed. You can also try restoring your photo library from a backup."
So I do this and try to repair the database as suggested and I get another error:
"iPhoto will open as soon as the iPhoto library is available. Time Machine might be backing it up."
But it's not - no external hard drive is connected.
I'm terrified I can't get access to my photos (and I admit I haven't backed up with Time Machine for over a year - my mistake that I won't make again).
So I bought a brand new external hard drive (seagate for mac and pc, 2TB) so I could save only my photos to the hard drive (because I googled and read you can manually save your photos to disk by dragging and dropping the photo library onto the external hard drive).
But I can't even get the hard drive to work....I get this error
"NTFS-3G could not mount /dev/disk2s1
at /Volumes/Seagate Backup Plus Drive because the following problem occurred:
/Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/fusefs.kext failed to load - (libkern/kext) link error; check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).
the MacFUSE file system is not available (71)"
I google the issue again and it says to uninstall NTFS-3G but I actually think I just deleted it a long ago without uninstalling it properly?? I don't know....
(a) how do i fix iphoto
(b) how do i get external hard drives to work with this OS (I've read lots of posts and don't really understand the advice)
(c) how do i get all my photos onto the hard drive safely so I can import them onto a PC
Any assistance would be magic for this little lady!

(c) how do i get all my photos onto the hard drive safely so I can import them onto a PC
First see if you can reformat the EHD to MS-DOS FAT with Disk Utility. If you can
open iPhoto and select all of the Events in the Events mode. Use the File ➙ Export ➙ File Export menu option and export to the EHD with these settings:
Select the destination for the export to be the EHD or a folder on the EHD. This process will create a folder for each Event in your library with the same name as the Event and contain the original image files. The EHD will be useable by a PC and the photos will be available also.

My external drive is full, how do I piggyback it with a new external hard drive?

My old external hard drive is full. How do I piggyback it with a new external hard drive? I am thinking of getting. 2tb western digital my studio for Mac.

Your iMac has four USB ports. If the new drive is also USB, just plug it into one of the unused ports.
Your machine also has a Firewire 800 port. If it is unused, you can connect a new external firewire drive to it.
Note - if you plan on using the new drive for booting (backup or emergency), such as by partitioning it and cloning your internal drive to one of the partitions on it, strongly suggest you go with a firewire drive.
In either case, firewire or USB, it's best to get a drive which has its own power supply.

"Sharing" external firewire drive with Windows Machine

Is there a way to share my external firewire drive on my mac with a networked XP machine?

Have a look at Sharepoints for the Mac. It should provide the services you are looking for.

How to move iTunes Library/Media Files to external firewire Hard Drive and make it the master library, and then point iTunes to that when adding new content??

How to move iTunes Library/Media Files to external firewire Hard Drive and make it the master library, and then point iTunes to that when adding new content??

Copy your ENTIRE iTunes FOLDER to an External Drive...
Full Details Here > http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751
To Operate iTunes from the External Drive...
Start iTunes with the Option key held down and guide it to the new location of the library.
Be Sure the drive is Formatted Mac OS Extended (journaled)
Also... have a look at these 2 Videos...
http://macmost.com/moving-your-itunes-library.html
http://macmost.com/moving-your-itunes-media-to-an-external-drive.html

I have a Power Mac G4 (2004) and want to transfer all my files to a new MacBook Pro 15.4". Can this be done thru firewire cable or do I have to transfer to an external Firewire 800 hard drive first?

I have a Power Mac G4 (2004) and want to transfer all my files to a new MacBook Pro 15.4". Can this be done thru firewire cable or do I have to transfer to an external Firewire 800 hard drive first?

Do it with a Firewire cable (buy a 800/400 adapter if you need it) - the USB transfer takes a much longer time.
Start up your old PowerMac G4 holding down the "T" key, for target disk mode.
On your new MacBook Pro open "Migration Assistant" in your utilities folder.
Connect the 2 computers by firewire cable and follow the prompts in Migration Assistant.

How do I format a new external Hard drive for Mac?

Simple question I know for many of you out there but I could do with some advice as I have never done this before. I would like to buy a new external hard drive to store my music and photos on. I will get one with firewire and usb2 connectivity.Could someone walk me through the steps needed to format and prepare a hard drive for use with my Macbook (if it is not already Mac formatted). Will any brand of hard drive work with Mac or are some better than others?

In addition to what Templeto Peck said, make sure that you select the formating to be OSX Extended.
As far as the best esternal drive, type into the "Search Discussion" box: Best external hard drive. This will bring you to several previouslly posted threads that discuss quite thoroughly your question. The following is extracted from one thread:
The best drives are those that use the Oxford 911 chipset. I like the Mercury Elite Pro drives from OWC, but there are plenty of others that use the same chipset.

Need User Name and Password for External Firewire new hard drive

In the past, I've worked with two 250 GB PATA drives in my G4, one inside and one in an external Firewire enclosure. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy and maintain all system and user files from the internal drive to the external drive. The external drive would boot just fine. These two drives were both partitioned with 74.5 and 158.4 GB partitions with the system files on the smaller.
The internal drive died so I bought a new 500GB drive and installed it in the external enclosure and moved the former external drive inside the G4.
I again used CCC to copy the system and user files to the new 500GB drive.However, I only gave it one 465.8GB partition. I cannot make the external drive complete the boot process. It stops and demands a user name and a password. I've not been able to supply ones which work.
I have remembered and entered the user name and password which were installed when I partitioned the 250 GB drives years ago. The window thinks a few seconds and then shakes back and forth and then clears the data entry boxes so that I can try again.
I do have an Install DVD for Tiger 10.4 (bought from Apple) and have been able to use that to go back and change the root or administrator password and the User password on the computer. That has not solved my problem.
I have read about 25 pages of this forum and not seen any posts that referred to password problems with only the external hard drive. But I've seen some very knowledgeable answers to other people's posts.
Please help.
Gil

Generally, when Mac OS X is asking you for a username and password, it is when you are doing something that requires an Administrator password, such as repairing a hard drive's Directory or making major changes to quasi-System things.
So Carbon Copy Cloner and Disk Utility are likely asking for an Administrator user_id and password. It will not take a simple carriage return as an answer -- the operation will not complete without that Admin authorization.
If you are among the \[estimated five or six] people who actually read the manual and followed the advice to use a non-admin password for your day-to-day computer work, you may not even remember the Admin username and password.
If you have an Installer CD, you can boot to the Installer CD and choose Reset Password off the Installer menu (10.3 and earlier) or the Utilities menu (10.4 and later). There is also an Installer-compatible version of Disk Utility there, and while booted from the CD is an ideal Time to Repair your main Hard Drive, while it is not being used for booting the System.

New external firewire HD makes my Mac freeze

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for