Snow Leopard and external firewire drives

When is Apple going to acknowledge the problems with external drive access created by Snow Leopard?

Quite correct. I should not expect Apple to answer the question here. And who knows maybe they are actually working on a solution.
Since you made a kindly offer I will describe the problem in more detail.
Since upgrading to SL I have had constant problems with my firewire external drive. Unfortunately that was the drive with my Time Machine backups. The symptoms of the problems revolve around startup and recognition of the drive. The drive appears in the list but will not open, Time Machine attempted to initiate backup and just spun. I discovered that it was necessary to completely shut down my Imac, disconnect the firewire drive and power it down. I have tried leaving the drive connected and powered, sometimes the Imac sees the drive sometimes not. I have tried leaving the drive connected but powering it down, powering it up and starting the Imac sometimes it sees the drive sometimes not but more frequently than when I leave it connected. The most reliable way to reconnect to the drive is to shut down the Imac, disconnect and powerdown the drive, startup the mac, login, repower the drive and reconnect.
In the course of trying to find a solution I have tried both Disk Utility use and Tech Tool Pro. Both programs are unable to correct the problem, most frequently displaying the message "unable to unmount drive". However after the above mentioned repower sequence running either Disk Utility or TechTools Pro describes the drive as OK.
In the course of all of this I decided to wipe the drive and reformat. I was unable to remove the Time Machine files to another drive so I made the decision to abandon the backups since I made additional manual backups of the critical files and I have all my install disks.
I reformated the drive but I have not started Time Machine again. Time machine has not worked once successfully since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. And further it is clear that the same problems exist on the reformatted drive. At this point probably the best solution is to abandon SL until it leaves beta stage (if ever) and return to 10.5. Had I made that decision earlier I might (emphasize might) have been able to restore from Time Machine. Now the only option is a fully manual restore back to 10.5.
I would like to emphasize that I operate and have operated my Macs as absolutely "box stock" with no system tweeks or any third party tools. The majority of my software on this machine is Apple both Works and Life. I have MacLinkPlus Quicken, Stuffit, Bento, Data Desk, Photoshop elements, Firefox browser, Flip 4 Mac and DivX as the only third party software.

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    Message was edited by: artemisworks

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