13 months ago I bought an external USB/FW drive,
a 120GB Hitachi (IBM's provider) 7200R 8MB - but
have had problems recently with boot-freezes
which may or may not be related to the drive's
(presumed) use of the Oxford chipset ... I recall
seeing a MacNN link about an Apple patch or some-
thing fixing some problem with drives using
Oxford 9.02 or 9.12 or something, I'm not sure.
My old G3 iMac DV400 has has 576MB RAM and
only a 10GB HD, which is why I bought the ext. HD.
I suspect the boot-freezes (I have OSX 10.3.9 now
on the main drive, and need to boot into one of my
ext. drive's partitions to install it there as a backup
and to run Disk Warrior from an external OS) may
have some other reason, but I want to be sure to
eliminate this as a potential problem and have a
specific named description of the Firewire problem
before i search for fix recommendations from
Hitachi's site. Among other things, symptoms are
that if I try to "Startup Disk" select an external
partition's OS (the choices are 9.2.2 on the main
drive and three ext. partitions, 10.3.7 on one ext.
partition, 10.2.4 on another, both of which have
the updater ready-to-launch from within) the
attempt to boot from the external in _any_ OS
brings up that OS startup icon (9.2.2 = small
Mac computer icon, 10.3.x = the grey big Apple
icon) wherupon the drive boot stalls after a minute
(no further drive-running sounds, a complete freeze).
Even when I turn off the external when rebooting (the
only way to return to the main HD), there are intervals
of stalls, esp. in 9.2.2 ... I display seconds on the menu-
bar clock, and that tells me there's stalls of 3-4 minutes
causing a total boot time of 15 minutes sometimes.
And, of course, there may be some other factor not
considered yet, such as that little battery that maintains
the date, etc. (though rarely does the system boot without
displaying the current date, no problem 95% of the time).
SUMMARY: point me to the FW/Oxford link and/or
comment on what I'm trying to do.   THANX!
— Alán Alán Apurim in Houston
E-mail <a href="mailto:apurim@gmail.com">apurim@gmail.com</a>, visit <a href="http://geocities.com/namorado.geo">___C a s a___d o___N a m o r a d o___</a>
Top
