Two Identical Firewire drives not recognised

I've just purchased a "Western Digital My Book Premium 500gb" Plugged it in and no problem all up and running. So decided on a second one plugged that in in the daisy chain and then the other drive dissappears saying that i have disconnected it!
The drive is fine as the new one will mount on its own without the other one present and its not my macbook pro since the same happened on my macmini.
Both systems are fully updated. The only way i can get the original drive to appear is to remove the other and then reset.
Also if both drives are connected during the boot up, the system hangs on a blue screen.
I am wondering if the Identy of the drives appear identical? I have been able to rename them differently but this has not helped.
Any Suggestions please?
Matt

Hi,
I have exactly the same problem with two External Hardrives I bought (Seperate Welland HD enclosures with identical Seagate 250GB hard disks inside) Attempting to connect with Firewire 400
Exactly same syptoms (Disk Utilities shows they have the same connection ID.)
Did you ever manage to solve this issue. I would love to know an answer.
I can get the second drive recognised at the same time if I plug it into the USB 1 port on the mac - but thats not much use - too slow.
Also USB 2 doesn't seem to work either.

Similar Messages

I just added two external firewire drives and they keep going to sleep. I did not have this problem when USB. I have turned off "put disks to sleep" in power preference.

I just added two external firewire drives and they keep going to sleep. I did not have this problem when using USB external drives. I have turned off "put disks to sleep" in power preference.

It is not clear if these are the same drives, just connected
differently, or different drives?
One thing that may be happening is that the drives firmware
itself is putting it to sleep when inactive. Many drives on
the market have ths feature and it is turned on by default
and require a drive utility from the manufacturer to disable it.

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.

Firewire drive not visible on desktop

Firewire drive not visible on desktop
System profiler knows it's there.
Disk Utility indicates that it can be un-mounted (only a generic 'turned down page' for volume icon however), Disk has full Hard Drive logo...
But I cannot access it on this machine, but plug it into another and it's ok...

(only a generic 'turned down page' for volume icon however), Disk has full Hard Drive logo...
You can see that appearance in Disk Utility if the volume permissions are such that the current user has "No Access."
Since it can be accessed normally from another machine, connect it there and do a Get Info from Finder, looking at the Ownership and Permission Details at the bottom. Assuming this is not a startup disk, if any of the permissions is set to "No Access", change it to "Read and Write". Don't click "Apply to enclosed items" however.

All firewire devices not recognised after upgrading to Leopard 10.5.4

Hello, yesterday I finally got around to upgrading one of my home computers (old Emac G4 powerpc from 2005) to Leopard. I have been using Leopard on my work computer (G5 also from 2005) with no problems for a year now (this Leopard update was installed professionally when. I work with a lot of files on external hd's, mostly Lacies, one Maxtor and yesterday got new G-Drive 1TB. Since the upgrade the Emac will not recognise any of the external hds when connected by Firewire. It will recognise them if I use the USB. However I'm sending too much media traffic (film editing) to just use usb all the time. I need my firewire connections!
This is clearly a Leopard issue, there are no problems with the drives or the firewire connections or the cables, they all work fine on the work computer and my other home computer (powerbook laptop G4) and as I said the upgraded emac will recognise them from usb. And since it's three different kinds of drives that all work on other computers but all stopped working on the single Leopard upgrade it's not a Lacie, Maxtor or G-drive problem.
I've seen a lot of threads on this and other support forums about firewire problems but some are a slightly different problem and many are quite old so I wonder if anyone has any recent experience/advice for me?
Many threads complain that Apple was not recognising the problem, maybe there is also some progress there?
thanks in advance for any help!

It's still possible that there is now a hardware issue, and if so it might respond to resetting the FireWire bus. This can often be done by just unplugging the power cord for a few minutes.
From
*What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire or USB device*
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1317?viewlocale=en_US
# Shut down the computer.
# Disconnect all devices and all other cables, except the keyboard and mouse cable(s).
# Disconnect the computer from the power outlet and wait for 3 to 5 minutes.
# Plug the computer back in and turn it on.
# 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.
--------------------------

External Hard Drives not recognised

I have a few different external hard drives on which I have stored photos and movies etc. I used to keep them attached and on all the time, but decided some time back it might be better to leave them off until required. I now have OSX 10.5.8 on my Mac Pro and Macbook Pro and neither will recognise my external hard drives. 1 is a LaCie and the other a iOmega.
Have tried a reboot on both machines with the drives switch on, and off, disconnected and re-connected cables, nothing works, they just don't appear!
Any ideas?
Thanks
Douglas

Maybe the following will help....
Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work!
First, you should always Repair Permissions in Disk Utility before and after any update; I would do that now. If you installed your update with FireWire plugged in, your Mac may not recognize it anymore.
Try resetting your FireWire ports by disconnecting all FW devices, shut down your Mac and unplug it from AC power (wall socket) for 30 minutes. plug it back in and try FW.
If that didn't work, download the combo update from this site (yours may be corrupt), not Software Update, disconnect all firewire + USB devices except keyboard + mouse, Repair Permissions, re-install update, Repair Permissions again + try.
If that still didn't get it Zap the PRAM. While restarting Mac hold down the following key combo Command-Option-P-R. Keep holding those keys down till you hear the second start-up chime, then release.
For those of you with Macs that are not PowerBooks or iBooks, a bad internal PRAM battery can cause FireWire to not be recognized, so make sure it's good! Also, here is Apple KB HT1317 on getting FireWire to work.
Here's another Fw Faq.
DALE

External hard drive not recognised in start up options

Hi! I'm struggling to get to grips with creating a bootable external drive - any advice would be very welcome!
I've recently bought a LaCie Triple Interface 300GB external drive to use for backup storage and to use as a back up bootable drive should disaster strike. It's connected to my Mac via the FireWire 800 port.
I've backed up my documents and cloned system folders and apps using Intego Backup, but the drive is not recognised in the start up options of the system preferences, nor does it appear as a bootable drive when I option-restart.
Do I need to format and partition the drive before it will be recognised as a bootable drive? (I haven't done so) Or have I just cloned the wrong thing?! I'm not entirely sure what I need to clone to be able to boot and back up from it. Should I clone the entire HD?
Or does it sound like something else entirely?
Can anyone help??
1.8 GHz PowerPC G5 6.5MB RAM Mac OS X (10.2.x)

I'm not familar with Intego Backup. Get Carbon Copy Cloner and use it to clone your entire drive, user files and all.Be sure to check the "make bootable" box before you start the process. Could be that Intego isn't capable of making a drive bootable.

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).

Original DVD drive not recognised

My macmini (1.83Ghz) suddenly stopped recognising its own DVD drive. No mods done to the mac mini but suddenly it does not recognise the drive. there is a movie DVD in it, which spins from time to time (for example when rebooting the mac mini or waking from sleep) but system profiler does not see a DVD drive (when i click on disc burning it shows 'No disc burning device was found. If the device is external, make sure it’s connected and turned on.' this is annoying since i cannot remove the dvd that is there nor play it.
did anyone ever come across this? what can be done to fix it? how to eject the disc manually to see if it's the disc which is the issue?

i did that. the mini took a long time to start but still not dvd drive on the system profiler. i don't know if related but on starting up, it also behaves funnily. after the grey apple screen with a spinning wheel below, i get a blue screen and it seems that nothing happens for ever. the only way to get back into the mini is to set it to sleep (pushing the power button does that) then waking it up. i then get a started up mini but it does not respond to mouse action (although the arrow moves, the click don't seem to have an effect and the keyboard is unresponsive (both are bluetooth). after a while though (around 2 min) they both operate correctly which is how i reply to you. this has been the case ever since the dvd drive disapeared so the two problems appear linked. the mini is running snow leoppard.
please help me - thanks.
p

Firewire drives not showing up

I did the most current updates yesterday, firmware etc... Now my firewire drives will not show up. What do I need to do? I rebuilt permissions, ran Techtool Pro 6, Ran CleanMyMac and still has not changed. Running LIon

Well didn't get an answer here so I decided to connect yet another hard drive to MBP. it worked. the two drives I was trying to mount were the ones that I had connected during update of software and firmware. this tells me that it fried the firewire 800 ports on drives. The lesson for me is to unmount/dis-connect external drives during firmware updates.

Firewire Drives not showing and no Target disk mode

Strange problem. My two g4 450's one dual and one single will not start in Target disk mode, will not recognize Firewire drives and yet WILL recognize my iSight camera. What's going on?
Have 6 different drives to choose from but none mount. They all work on my G5 & MDD Dual
Enio

PROBLEM AND SOLUTION:
One computer does not recognize the other, which was booted into Firewire Target Disk Mode (either by holding the T key on start up, or by selecting FTDM in system preferences as the start up mode).
My particular case: older MBP to newer MBP unibody. I have a cable that is firewire 400 with a firewire 800 tip on the other end (6-9 pin cable). This cable is needed, for instance, if you machine only has firewire 400 but your new machine only has firewire 800 (like the new Unibody MBP). Well, they sold me this 6-9 pin cable at the store, when they should have just given me a firewire 800 cable straight across, because both machines have FW 800. Anyway, I tried the 6-9 pin cable, where the old MBP was connected via its 400 port to the Unibody's 800 port.
No dice. Would not mount, nothing. Repeated restarts, checked the cable and it does work... called Apple tech support, nothing. Researched the web until finally I think I know what it is.
There is not enough power coming from the 400 port to power the 800 port. I tried this 400-800 with my new Mac Mini as well, and it does not work. It does, however, get picked up on the older MBP when using a straight FW 400 cable. I then came across an article saying that someone was told by Apple that the FW bus can, in some machines, not provide enough power for FWTD mode. The solution for 400-800 is to go 800-800, or 400-400 if you can. If these latter don't work (FWTD mode fails to mount the connected computer's hard drive), us a powered firewire hub and connect Computer A to it, then connecting the hub to Computer B.

External USB Hard Drive Not Recognised / Seen

Hi,
I have a WP 250 GB External hard drive which was working fine until recently and now is not recognised by my 2007 Intel Macbook. When I plug in the hard drive, a light comes on solidly and it begins whirring. Then, it continues to whirr as if it was going to work, but the light starts flickering.
It is not visable as an external hard drive in finder. 'View Hard Disk' is switched on under Finder / Preferences. On System Profiler, when I click 'USB' fom the list on the left, the computer displays the circular "thinking about it" spinning thing, and system profiler freezes, and nothing else happens. The same thing happens with disk utility.
I tried plugging the hard drive into a windows computer, and it worked fine; all the files inside it were visable. It is formatted to my mac and I have successfully used the hard drive many times before. A logical next step would be to try it on another mac but I don't have access to one.
I have tried to to a PRAM reset, but couldn't do it, even following the instructions on the MAC website (turn off computer, turn on and hold the mac button, ctrl, p, and r simultaneously) it wouldn't do a PRAM reset.
I am not a computer expert, but I am not completely green either. Why is it that doing the simplest thing on a computer requires a minimum of a 4 year computer science degree or equivalent.... somebody please help me crack this, I am close to smashing the whole thing to pieces with a hammer (which would be satisfying but counterproductive and expensive...)
Thanks in advance for your replies

Did you allow Windows to upgrade the formatting on this drive from FAT to NTFS recently? You should be able to check the formatting on the volume from within Windows. It would also be worth trying to repair the drive under Windows if it allows you to.
Note that NTFS is not readable under OS 10.4.x without special software. NTFS is read-only but not writable under OS 10.5 and later.
If the volume isn't NTFS, and repairing it doesn't help, you may need to just backup the data and try to reformat it.

My Book 500 GB ext firewire drive not compatible with osx 10.3.9???

When apple support immediately blames other companies for problems and at the same time refuses to help me get osx booting on an external hard drive just because apple didn't make the external device, it sure sounds like microsoft's slimy politics. Should I stop buying macs because they won't boot off an external hard drive because apple support won't help?
I tried copying my current osx with diskutil (an apple product). When I try to boot off it, I get a square with a ? then the finder icon, then it boots off the internal hard drive. Surely its a problem with diskutil (an apple product)!
I have no problems booting off my internal drive so I know the os is good. I ran disk util and it reported errors which disk util couldn't fix but disk warrier said it fixed... OMG!
Funny thing is... it reported different errors on the 2 drives (one a copy of the other). Tried using carbon copy clone which always worked before. It refuses to boot of the my book drive. I have leopard on a second external drive which boots normally. So what is wrong with the 500gb My book drive or osx? It is a firewire drive so it should boot. It had no problem installing a dozen times osx 10.3.9 & 10.3.5 but still get the same ? and finder icons before booting internally.
Tried to get help from WD (drive maker). No luck after the 4th try so I'm zeroing the drive and taking it back.
Unless I can get it working tomorrow... somehow... without apple support....?
And I bought the drive so I could use Time Machine! (another apple product). No support there either...
Should I just turf the drive and stop buying macs?

Thanks for the quick response. I didn't bother to check what format it had. Just reformatted it for mac.
Yes, I ran the disk partion in diskutil and split it into 2 partitions. Didn't make any difference with the boot problem because when I set it back to one partion and installed 10.3.5 off the dvd, it still had the same ? finder icon issue. So I doubt it was a partition issue.
So I did format it hfs+ and used the partition tab in disk util. So that's why I don't understand why it is suddenly a problem as I had no issue cloning drives to my other ext. hard drive.
At first I thought it might be an issue with the bootable partition not being the first one listed. But that didn't make a difference when I changed the order. Usually I just run carbon copy cloner and make a bootable copy but that didn't work either. Tried installing from the dvd, that didn't work either. So I'm at a loss to explain why its such a nightmare to make a bootable backup.
The working copy on my internal hard drive runs just fine even with/without errors. Surely a cloned copy should also work as it has in the past.
Basically, I wanted to clone my internal hd to an external one so I can move my leopard os on another ext hd and put it on my internal drive.
Right now I have panther on my ibook drive and leopard on my ext hd. I'd rather have it the other way around since the leopard patches seem to have fixed things.
On my panther drive I have vp7 and xp installed. Whether that makes a difference, who knows?

Hard drive not recognised - do I need a new hard disk?

I have a 2010 year MacBook running Lion. Performance dropped off this week, all actions very slow. Then the machine would not boot, I just got the white screen with the fan circulating at the bottom. I did a re-start with control-R pressed and got the Lion console. I ran disk repair, green initially. Fix Permission was/is red and said to run run repair disk. Then the hard disk cannot be viewed in disk utility. I've been round in circles trying this a few times. I have tried to restore from time capsule and also re-install Lion. The issue is always that the machine cannot find a hard disk to install to. I have also tried putting in the Snow Leopard disk but it will not install the OS from that. Is the hard disk dead? What am I missing? I had the hard disk replaced under warranty in late 2011 just before the 1 year warranty was up. This seems poor to me. Any help appreciated.

That SCSC documentation is quite good. I can see why others are referencing it so often.
With that in mind, you're really facing several possibilities:
The drive is bad
The cable is bad
The system is bad
If you could do something with an external drive, like set it up to boot and load the OS, you could would at least know that the core logic board is functioning properly, excluding the SATA cable, internal HD, and any connections it makes. If it works consistently in that mode, you know the CPU, RAM, and at least most of the connections between the I/O controller are decent. I'm basing this on the SCSC document about "path isolation." I would suggest using Scannerz on it, but your system would need to be at least bootable to do that, and I'm not really sure it is. If you could get an inexpensive external enclosure to swap out drives, you could do some of these tests without needing Scannerz at all. Mind you, it would be a lot easier with Scannerz but not necessary. The big "trick" with Scannerz is that if the results can be replicated from test to test, it's the platters of the drive that are the problem (and in most cases it is), but if you're getting long irregularities or I/O errors and they don't correlate to the surface scan progress, it's either the cable (most likely) or logic board problems.
As an FYI, years ago I had a 14" iBook and it developed some type of bad connection at the junction between the hard drive connector and the logic board. Attempting to use it with an internal HD renderered the system useless. However, by connecting a small FireWire drive in an external enclosure, the system was rendered useful again. Kind of a pain in the posterior to use, but not the end of the world,FWIW. My point is that if the problem ends up being related to the logic board, it doesn't mean that system is useless.
With all this in mind, I'd like to add that Scannerz is a great product. It's clever. Genuinely clever. Using the surface scan progress to segregate drive platter problems, which are typically consistent, and cable/system problems, which typically occur randomly without warning is somewhat ingenious. Using path isolation is also ingenious. However, and I stated this on another thread, the manual that comes with the product is overly technical and long winded. Better information is obtained from their web site, for anyone interested, IMHO.

Time Machine on FireWire drive not recognized

Got an iMac with a FireWire drive set up as a TimeMachine volume.
In addition, I have a MBP, connected to the network via Wifi (Airport Extreme).
Under Snow Leopard, both Macs were able to do TimeMachine updates to the FireWire drive connected to the iMac.
Now, under Lion, the TimeMachine volume is still recognized and functional (i.e. successful backup) for the iMac, but not visible anymore for the MBP.
The MBP can't see the TimeMachine volume, let alone back up to it.
What gives ?
Is this perhaps a network or access authorization issue ?
Thanks.

Ok, so here some more information.
iMac (Lion) with connected FW HD, thus hosts the TimeMachine volumes, connected via Ethernet to AirportExtreme
MBP (Lion), connected via WLAN to AirportExtreme
Connecting FROM iMac to MBP:
Sidebar - Shared computers: OK
Terminal SSH: OK
Finder - Go - Connect to Server: OK
Connecting FROM MBP to iMac:
Sidebar - Shared computers: Error "Connection failed"
Terminal SSH: OK
Finder - Go - Connect to Server: Error "There was a problem connecting to the server"
I'm really beginning to think my MBP Lion install is borked.

Two Identical Firewire drives not recognised

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for