[CaptainHaddock]

Hello, I'm a new switcher and owner of a 20" iMac. The other day, I bought a FireWire/USB hard disk enclosure so I can get important data off some drives from my old machine. The enclosure is an ADS "dual drive kit".

Today, I hooked up the external drive and plugged it into the FireWire port. Bam! My screen went black. Turns out, every time I plug the drive into the Firewire port, the Mac crashes and won't restart until the drive is unplugged again.

I don't think there's a problem with the drive enclosure, because if I plug it into the USB port, it works fine (but slow). What's going on here? Do I have a bad firewire port? I don't have any other Firewire peripherals to test it with.

[Spheric Harlot]

ouch.

definitely a hardware problem. hard to tell whether it's the disk or the machine, since you don't have another Firewire item (the drive enclosure's USB port working doesn't necessarily indicate that the Firewire port should, as well - after all, your iMac's USB ports are working just fine too).

I'm afraid you'll have to either organize another Firewire device for testing (possibly just exchange the external drive?), or take in the Mac.

My bet is on the drive being the problem, btw.

-s*