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glo · May 26, 2003, 10:09 AM

All,

I really need some emergency help. I have an external Maxtor 60gb firewire drive. I noticed yesterday that it no longer was mounted on my desktop OSX 10.2.6. I have not used it in a while, so it may have not been on the desktop for a while.

Well i cannot get it to mount anymore. The drive light is green, and I feel it spinning, but it is not recognized. I tried it on my second mac, same problem, it does not mount.

I tried booting in os 9 and tried to use the utilities that Maxtor shipped with the drive. Well os 9 does not see the drive.

I use this drive ironically as my backup drive. It is full of imovies and pictures of my kids, my wifes dissertation etc.

Can someone help me please???? I was thinking of opening up the firewire case and trying to reseat the drive, or reset it if that can be done. I also have tried diffferent firewire cables and have had no luck with that.

Can i take out the drive and put it directly into my MDD. Does anyone know how to do this....

PLEASE any assistance would be appreciated...

Thanks in advance

GLO

iNeusch · May 26, 2003, 10:12 AM

does OSX's "Disk Utility" see the drive ?

glo · May 26, 2003, 10:24 AM

Unfortuantly the OSX disk utility does not see the drive.... :-(

The system profiler does not see any mounted firewire device, but I know that the firewire plug does work, because it does see my ipod when i plug that in....

glo

iNeusch · May 26, 2003, 10:28 AM

sounds bad
do you have a diskwarrior around ?

kovacs · May 26, 2003, 10:29 AM

Sorry to hear that, I've had some problems with my maxtor firewire drive as well, the only solution I see is opening the drive and removing the hard disc, you should be able to install it in your tower, it uses the same connectors as any other hard drive, just be careful... I don't know howw to open the drive without braking anything, I see no screws so that can be tricky...

glo · May 26, 2003, 10:31 AM

i do not have disk warrior, and i was thinking of getting it, but doesn't the computer need to see the drive first expecially firewire....do you know if I can take the drive out of the Maxtor case and put it directly into my dulie 867?

glo

iNeusch · May 26, 2003, 10:36 AM

Originally posted by glo:
i do not have disk warrior, and i was thinking of getting it, but doesn't the computer need to see the drive first expecially firewire....do you know if I can take the drive out of the Maxtor case and put it directly into my dulie 867?

glo

sure, that will work, but only if it's the firewire interface that's broken (just put the drive in your mac like kovacs said)
if it is the partitions, you'll need diskwarrior

MacNStein · May 26, 2003, 11:13 AM

I've encountered quite a few instances where a drive formatted through a FW enclosure aren't properly recogized through an IDE/ATA connection. The system will commonly ask if you want to initialize the drive... must have something to do with recognizing the formatting scheme used by the FW bridge in the enclosure.

Anyway, get a copy of Diskwarrior and install it. Then connect the FW drive and make sure that you don't initialize the drive when Finder asks you to. Then, start up Diskwarrior and select your FW drive from the Drives list and select "Rebuild", it should show up on the list. After Diskwarrior does it's thing, it'll give you a list of the changes it's made and tell you that it's made a directory replacement for your FW drive. Before finalizing the directory replacement, select that you want to preview the drive and it'll mount a useable volume of your FW drive on your desktop, then drag-copy whatever important files that are on the FW drive on to your internal drive. Oncer that's done, select that you want Diskwarrior to repair your FW directory.

Good luck!

glo · May 26, 2003, 11:21 AM

Great, you are all very kind. Well i am going to give it a try....

glo

glo · May 26, 2003, 11:50 AM

WOW. That was easy. It worked. The drive mounted fine after I took it out of the firewire enclosure and put it into my dualie directly....

All the files are there.....

Thank you , thank you thank you....

One more question, just some advice.....should I buy a much bigger drive say a 120, move all of my files onto the new drive, and trash this one?

Or could it just be that the firewire interface went bad....

what would you do?

glo

kovacs · May 26, 2003, 12:36 PM

No keep this drive, it will not cause you any troubles anymore, I had similar problems with my Maxtor, it would still work but performance was not acceptable ( it took a few minutes to copy a few mp3's ), I got a new bigger internal drive from my dealer... I'm never going to buy another maxtor firewire drive again that's for sure, it was good drive when it was working, fast and quit but not reliable...

Sound and performance are usually good indicators of the health of your drive, if it doesn't make and strange noises and performance is fine the drive is probably in good shape...

wynn · Jul 20, 2003, 09:36 PM

it's amazing how flakey the maxtor external fw drives are. i was given an 80gig from my boss because he told me it was "unreliable." long story short, the drive tested fine and i reformatted. tried using the drive in os x 10.2.6 and on 9.2.2 and it was very inconsistent. i'm going to trash the case and keep the drive.

sidenote - i've been using a western digital 120gb external and it works flawlessly between my 1ghz tibook (running 10.2.6 and 9.2.2) and my desktop winxp system. never had a problem and i lug the drive everywhere.

i did a search on google and it seems like a ton of people are having issues with the maxtors fw external 60gig+ drives.

can someone recommend a solid 3.5 fw case that is super-stable?