*Client Says:*
We have two external 120GB ICE cube firewire drives for backup. One is hooked to the server, using sychronise pro X to back it up regularly. works beautifully.
Each day, we ‘rotate’ the drives and take one off site. We are very good.
Problem is, after five or six ‘rotations’ the server will not mount the drive. We are careful to observe the correct dismount/mount procedure:
1. doubleclick the drive to ‘wake it up’
2. drag it to the trash to dismount.
3. switch it off
4. unplug
5. plug in new drive
6. switch it on
As mentioned, this works fine four or five times, then – nothing. The drive will just not mount. tried rebooting the finder, swapping cables, swapping firewire ports. nada. Only fix is to reboot the server, which sucks. I am secretly hoping that upgrading the server to 10.3 will fix it, but I am worried that either the external drive’s firewire driver is crap or the server has a hardware problem with it’s firewire.. dunno… needs fixing”
*Core Answer:*
hmmm – been seein’ this a fair bit. Even our Dual 1.25GHz G4 does this. Our other G4 doesn’t but then it’s firewire ports haven’t been used much. It’s often the cables (some people actually recommend replacing firewire cables once a month if heavily used) – or it’s the firewire ports themselves. If it’s the ports on your logic board and the machine is out of warranty a four port firewire PCI card will set you back a mere $70 or so.
For more excellent info here’s the article that says it all:
*FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices*
- a White Paper by James Wiebe
[http://www.wiebetech.com/pressreleases/FireWirePortFailures.htm](http://www.wiebetech.com/pressreleases/FireWirePortFailures.htm)
Quoted Highlights from white paper:
Be careful of bad cables:
_”The author was directly told of a typical experience at a major computer company. An employee observed that his FireWire drive would not mount. Suspecting trouble and wanting to verify it, the employee tested the device on three more computers. The device wouldn’t mount on any of the four computers. The ultimate cause of the problem was a bad cable which fried four host ports on the four computers. The FireWire drive was not at fault. The author assumes that each of the four PHYs was destroyed.”_
_..and definitely don’t put ‘em in the wrong way! If you can’t see the ports and you’re reaching over a monitor blindly stabbing the cable into roughly the right location – get a small mirror and do it properly. It may save your firewire drive and firewire ports. I find Karen’s pink makeup mirror works a treat – must remember to put it back…”_
This guy knows firewire – he and his company builds firewire drives – stay tuned for a price list here**
This report is quite scary:
*More on the Dangers of Hot Swapping FireWire Devices*
[http://www.lowendmac.com/misc/03/0421.html](http://www.lowendmac.com/misc/03/0421.html)
_”I manage the Center for Digital Media at the San Francisco Art Institute, where we run a couple Mac networks with approximately 40 FireWire enabled computers and roughly 7 or so FireWire peripherals. These peripherals include video decks, CD burners, and peripheral hard drives. Of these, three Panasonic video decks now have burnt out motherboards from hot-swapping to and from Apple G4 towers (the decks cost $900 new, and $1,200 to replace the motherboards). Our JVC video deck has been in for repairs to the FireWire bridge three times at approximately $400 per repair. Two FireWire peripheral hard drives have fried, and four peripheral FireWire CD burners have burnt-out bridges, making the cases useless (we have since loaded those CD burners as internal units in the towers). This puts the grand total of damaged and repaired FireWire devices at roughly $3,500. Quite a nut for the convenience of hot-swapping, wouldn’t you say?”_