Western Digital My Book Premium Edition - Firewire not Working

Question

Hey there everyone, I thought I would write about my Western Digital My Book experience for two reasons:
1. To see if anyone had any success getting the firewire option to work properly on their Intel based iMac.
2. To deter anyone else from buying this drive if you plan on using firewire.
When I bought the 320GB My Book Premium Edition from Best Buy I thought I had a great product.... why? Because the backup software included was easy to use and manage. I scheduled my first backup in a matter of minutes. As time went on I realized that this thing was just not going to play nice.
After failing to get the Firewire connection to work I decided to contact WD's customer support department to see what they could do.
My first call the Customer Support rep. ended with him saying that there was a known issue with the firewire cables that shipped with the product.
"We'll get one out to you in about 3 - 5 business days."
Well, 10 business days later the cable finally showed up. Plugged it in and I got the same result:
My iMac will simply not recognize the drive when using the firewire option. USB works fine EVERY time but for some weird reason it just will not mount with the firewire.
So, I called WD and they stated that the bad cable that was shipped with my drive more than likely ruined the firewire connections on the drive. So they take down my credit card information and ship me a new drive with RMA instructions.
A week later I get the new drive. Plug it in and guess what, same issue, different drive.
So I called WD support again and they say that the drive they sent me must be defective. Ok, I've almost had enough at this point. I tell the guy on the phone that this new drive they are sending me had better work or all three of these drives will be going back to where they came from.
So here is my suggestion - do not use the 320GB My Book Premium Edition if you plan on using firewire. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is here so I cannot say that this will happen on other systems that do not mirror mine. But be leary.
My brother came over the other day grabbed my so-called bad firewire and plugged in his external drive and it worked flawlessly. Bummer for me.
*A side note:* There is a firmware upgrade on the WD site (Version 1.08a) that is supposed to resolve issues with the firewire unique indentifier. I tried it on both drives and that didn't work either.

Answer 1

You and me both, unfortunately. I'm on my third WD My Book (although I have the 500GB version) and something like my sixth firewire cable. I called their support line last time and the support guy seemed extremely confident that a new firewire cable "will definitely fix my problem", but I'm highly skeptical of it.
Same story though- USB works without a hitch, but both Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 don't work. Drives don't show up in Disk Utility or Terminal with any Firewire connection. I've gone through 5-10 hours of Apple phone support to no avail.
The weird thing is that the drive doesn't work on my Rev A. MacBook either. Also, I can't use target disk mode over Firewire between my new 20" iMac and my MacBook (which was previously not a problem with my G5 iMac). At this point I'm getting worried that the original cable fried one or both of my Firewire ports on my iMac and/or my MacBook, although I haven't had the time or devices to test that theory yet. I'm not sure what the prospects of getting a refund for my My Book will be (since it's 6-8 months old since it was working on my G5 iMac for awhile), but it might have to come down to that eventually.