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Colonel Panic · Jan 27, 2002, 11:44 AM

i can never get them to mount consistently in X (.1.2), especially after waking from sleep. i get a success rate of about 50%. plugging/unplugging doesn't help. rebooting doesn't help. i need to reboot into 9 to get the drives recognized and then i can reboot into X.

anyone else have these problems? REALLY annoying....

Macola · Jan 27, 2002, 04:17 PM

Panic:
i can never get them to mount consistently in X (.1.2), especially after waking from sleep. i get a success rate of about 50%. plugging/unplugging doesn't help. rebooting doesn't help. i need to reboot into 9 to get the drives recognized and then i can reboot into X.

anyone else have these problems? REALLY annoying....[/QUOTE]

Yes, many of us have had problems with Maxtor...search these forums or at MacFixit. After getting my first Maxtor replaced under warranty, the second one finally died completely (refused to mount under any OS, drivers corrupted, and Firewire bridge circuitry dead). I suspect that the same will happen to you, as I had similar symptoms before the drive died. I'm now using an OWC Mercury FW drive and another that I built with a Macally case, without problems, other than an annoying bug in OS X that chokes on large file transfers between drives.

midwinter · Jan 27, 2002, 04:31 PM

Originally posted by Macola:
S X that chokes on large file transfers between drives.

What? That's a bug in X? I thought it was a bug in the drivers or just plain bad drives? So that's why my drive stalls transferring big DV captures....

Regarding the Maxtor drives, the only problems I consistently have with mine are with it spinning down when I don't want it to (like burning a CD from it) or being a bit slow to wake up.

I wonder if there's a way to keep it from spinning down....

Cheers
Scott

aladdinsane · Jan 27, 2002, 09:35 PM

I had endless problems with my first drive, especially with mounting, and finally had it replaced by Maxtor (9 mo ago). The new drive has always worked like a charm - no problems at all.

I suggest you have your drive replaced my Maxtor. If you want you can have the new drive shipped to you before you send yours to them, which gives you chance to copy all your data to the new drive.

I also had problems in the past due to FireWire problems on the Mac side. I saw some improvement after firmware upgrades. Make sure you have the latest firmware on you computer.

Good luck

Macola · Jan 28, 2002, 08:09 AM

Originally posted by midwinter:


What? That's a bug in X? I thought it was a bug in the drivers or just plain bad drives? So that's why my drive stalls transferring big DV captures....

Regarding the Maxtor drives, the only problems I consistently have with mine are with it spinning down when I don't want it to (like burning a CD from it) or being a bit slow to wake up.

I wonder if there's a way to keep it from spinning down....

Cheers
Scott

The Firewire bug in OS X is mentioned in the Apple Knowledge Base...it was supposedly fixed in 10.1.2, but there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. As far as preventing the drives from spinning down, I haven't found a good solution. There's a somewhat clumsy workaround--basically using a cron job to access the drive every few minutes, posted at MacOS Hints.

macanonymous · Jan 29, 2002, 02:56 PM

I've had my 80GB firewire Maxtor drive for almost a year now and I've never had any problems with it.

My roomate on the other hand had a couple problems with it and had it replaced with no problems. We even bought a third now and no problems there, either.

Who knows?

Colonel Panic · Jan 29, 2002, 06:21 PM

OK. I got some info. first, "plug it into the wall directly". no surge protector. um, OK.

second, to use in X, be sure you format using the Disk Utility - apparently Maxtor's OS 9 Utilities partition strangely - a small bit of drive (<1 MB) may be set up as an extra partition that causes the system grief when trying to mount. I saw this in Disk Utility when I finally got the drive to mount. So I reformatted using Disk Utility (which of course got rid of that little extra partition). Seems to be behaving now, working well even. I'll post if it goes adrift....

Macola · Jan 30, 2002, 10:06 AM

Originally posted by Colonel Panic:
OK. I got some info. first, "plug it into the wall directly". no surge protector. um, OK.

second, to use in X, be sure you format using the Disk Utility - apparently Maxtor's OS 9 Utilities partition strangely - a small bit of drive (<1 MB) may be set up as an extra partition that causes the system grief when trying to mount. I saw this in Disk Utility when I finally got the drive to mount. So I reformatted using Disk Utility (which of course got rid of that little extra partition). Seems to be behaving now, working well even. I'll post if it goes adrift....

Good luck. I did the same things, had the drive working for a few months, then it started dying. My advice: back up often.

zigzag · Jan 31, 2002, 10:43 PM

I saw something on xlr8yourmac.com (I think) about Maxtors being incompatible with CD burning software. Go to the drive compatibility section, select hard drive > firewire > maxtor (leave the others blank), and read the reports.

jtc · Feb 1, 2002, 11:28 AM

Originally posted by zigzag:
I saw something on xlr8yourmac.com (I think) about Maxtors being incompatible with CD burning software. Go to the drive compatibility section, select hard drive > firewire > maxtor (leave the others blank), and read the reports.

This is in OS 9, toast installs extensions that can cause problems.

As for the other problems people are posting, I have two FW HDs and a FW burner I use, and can say that I have only had problems in OS X, so this is definitely a driver problem.

Make sure you unmount (drag to the trash or command-y in 9, command-e in X) before unplugging the drive, putting the computer to sleep or shutting down. I've found that this helps prevent disk corruption that was a problem in OS X. It's easy enough to re-mount it, just unplug the cable for a second and plug it back in.