Pismo Firewire is SLOW to mount

Hello all
I have a 400MHz G3 Pismo Powerbook. I'm running OS 10.3.9 and 1GB of RAM. I have 2 different external firewire drives. One is a 20GB 2.5" bus-powered drive and the other is a 200GB drive partitioned into 3 partitions and in a powered case (with power brick). Both drives work perfectly on the other Macs in my stable (a G4 Mini, a G4 17" Powerbook AND a clamshell iBook) The drives show up instantaneously in OS 9 (iBook) and OS X (other Macs).
HOWEVER, on the Pismo any drive plugged into the FW port takes 2+ minutes to show up in the Finder. Once the drive appears, everything works normally (reading/writing, etc.) - it just takes a long time (2-3 mins) for the drive to mount. Interestingly enough, as soon as I plug the drive in, System Profiler recognizes the IEEE1394 to IDE bridge instantly, but I can't see the drives for a few minutes. It doesn't matter which FW port I use, and it doesn't matter what drive I use - they react the same, slow way.
I get the feeling this is not normal for the Pismo (since it's not for any of my other Macs). Any suggestions?
thanks,
Rich

Richard,
I have read of slow mounting FireWire drives on the Pismo and don't recall if anyone found a solution.
Just out of curiosity, does your System Profiler report "Boot ROM version 4.18f5"? If not, you may want to update to 4.1.8:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75132
Since the FW drives work perfectly on other Macs and also work well on your Pismo once mounted, I doubt there is much you can do. Curiously, one user said the FW drives mounted quickly when booted to 9.x; the slowdown only appeared in 10.x.

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Reply Email
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238
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That sounded like a brilliant thing to try. I took the drive out of the daisy chain and plugged it into the unused firewire port in the computer. I ran the repairs and crossed my fingers, but came up with the same thing
At least I've eliminated one more option. Wish I could mark your reply helpful, but I'm not seeing that option available . . .maybe I've used my "helpfuls" for one day.
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