[nayr x]

Hey all,
Think I have a problem on my hands.... I accidentally inserted my ACOM DATA harddrive's firewire cable in the back of my ti book upsidedown, (which seemed way easy to do...). I heard a screeching noise which i at first thought was coming through my speakers, and my screen was suddenly filled with a scrambled picture of my desktop with black lines and bits of unintelligible code. I instantly removed the cable, and was then forced to kill my computer by holding down the power key.

Now, When i turn on the drive, (whether connected or not), the hard drive (or a fan) spins up inside and sounds just like it used to, but the flickering red/greed light on the front of the drive does not light up at all, and it isnt recognized by the computer.

I assume im fohucked, but if there is anyway to recover the data?(or more prefferably, fix the drive), i really need to- I have a lot of work on there that is not backed up anywhere else. Does anyone have any suggestions or share a similar experience? Any idea how an upside-down firewire cable could cause such a huge meltdown? In my opinion those stupid firewire plugs should be impossible to insert the wrong way if it can be THAT harmful. It really slid right in with little resistance at all
~thanx

[Powaqqatsi]

You must have used seriously brute force man. It's quite impossible to put in the cable upside down.

[Macola]

You can crack open the case and install the drive internally in another Mac, or get a new case for it that has USB. Most likely, you've blown your TiBook's Firewire circuitry as well; you can check it with the Apple hardware test CD.

[tooki]

Apparently, the design of SOME FireWire sockets has the seam at the pointed end of the plug, and the seam just comes apart, allowing it to be plugged. That said, that should still require enough force that one would notice!

Regardless, the bus power was being applied to the wrong pins, which could cause significant damage to the drive's FireWire controller, which is now probably fried.

What Macola said is probably correct, although I'd say that most likely the PB's FireWire is OK.

Newer FireWire connectors are made without a seam at the pointy end, and in all the aluminum-cased Macs has surrounded the port with the metal of the case, making it completely impossible to insert incorrectly.

FireWire 800 ports are designed such that this problem shouldn't happen.

tooki

[Spheric Harlot]

Reboot your computer while holding down the "V" key.

This will run the normal startup routine, except that it will output every step along the way to the screen as a line of text.

If, quite at the beginning, it says something like "broken FWIOHC; aborting", that is referring to your Firewire I/O hardware controller chipset on the motherboard.

If that appears (I've seen it before), then I'm afraid the only solution to get Firewire working again is to replace your laptop's motherboard. ($$$)

-s*

[Angus_D]

I know someone who managed to do this on a new eMac. Fortunately Apple replaced the mobo for him, but still, I was amazed that he managed it.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
Reboot your computer while holding down the "V" key.

I believe you need to hold down the cmd key too.

[subego]

I've heard of this happening enough that I always look at the connector.

This is crummy design though. Badly manufactured seams aside, can anyone fathom a reason the pins need to line-up upside-down?