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sovereign · Mar 14, 2004, 04:40 PM

I have a Rev B 12" PB. When I connect the FW cable from my Maxtor 250gb One Touch HD the screen goes black with the "You Must Restart Your Computer Now" message. This does not occur when connecting the USB cable from the same drive. After restarting with the drive connected to the FW port the drive mounts to the desktop and everything is fine. The same phenomena also occurs with two other drives via FW, a 250gb Maxtor and 300gb Maxtor (my roomates drives). Any ideas? Thanks,

Detrius · 06:57 PM

1-run the apple hardware test. If it passes, continue to 2. If it fails, you have a hardware problem.

2-if you have any non-apple RAM, remove it at this point. Did this fix the problem? If so, the RAM is bad. If not, the RAM may still be bad because it may have corrupted your OS install.

3-If you have one of those drives already hooked up and then you plug in a second one, do you still get the kernel panic?

3a-(YES)-If so, you can try booting from one of those drives to see if the KP is still there. If it is still there, you have a hardware problem. If not, the OS on your laptop needs to be reinstalled. If the reinstall fixes the problem, you should be suspicious of the third party RAM.

3b-(NO)-If you don't get a KP by plugging in a second drive, you will have to do a clean install on your laptop internal drive. If that does not fix the problem, you likely have a hardware problem. If it does, you should be suspicious of the third party RAM.

4-flakey RAM can cause all kinds of bizarre problems. AHT doesn't always flag bad hardware correctly, so you *can't* rely on a pass from the apple hardware test. This applies to all hardware and is due to the simplistic nature of the test. Apple Certified Technicians have access to a much better hardware testing suite that non-apple certified technicians do not.

4a-If you have nothing but Apple hardware and an OS reinstall did not fix your problem, take the machine in to repair. At this point, it should be covered under warranty.

I think I pretty much covered all of your bases here. One thing I didn't say but am assuming is that the exact same firewire cable and hard drives do not cause a KP on a different Mac. If they do, clearly your laptop is not the problem.

BkueKanoodle · Mar 15, 2004, 01:01 AM

I had this same problem with my Maxtor 200 gb one touch drive and my 12 inch powerbook. The Odd part is, it worked when I first bought the drive. I fixed the problem by buying a 15 inch.

Seriously though, I never got around to figuring out what caused his, maybe I'll try it on my 12 inch again tomorrow and see what happens.

sovereign · Mar 15, 2004, 05:59 AM

The RAM is Crucial. The problem does not occur when I plug my Transintl 160GB external (Hitachi 7k250, Ice Cube enclosure) into the FW port. Only the Maxtor drives are doing this, and 3 different ones at that. Thanks for the replies.

tooki · Mar 15, 2004, 02:06 PM

Have you installed the latest Maxtor software (it was just released)? It's supposed to fix some bugs as well as make those drives bootable.

tooki

sovereign · 03:01 PM

Originally posted by tooki:
Have you installed the latest Maxtor software (it was just released)? It's supposed to fix some bugs as well as make those drives bootable.

tooki

I just installed the driver dated 09-04-2003. And what do you know? It works! Is there another, more recent download that should also be installed? Thanks!

tooki · Mar 16, 2004, 12:17 AM

No, I guess that's the one! I just found out about it recently, it was in some news/tech site I read (can't remember which).

tooki