[benwhanlee]

hey all,

i just bought a fw800-fw400 adapter cable to use my fw400 devices through the newer port. but none of my devices will work. my external drives will not mount and the computer will not recognize my burner. what's weird is that if i check in system profiler, it recognizes that a fw400 device is connected and with my lacie hard drive, it even lists the brand, device type, firmware version, etc. once, my other firewire drive (an old laptop drive in an owc external enclosure) did mount, but i immediately got the spinning color wheel and had to shut down. strangely, it never again mounted after that. all the devices work properly when connected with my fw400 port. i haven't been able to mount them with disk utility either.

i haven't ever tried connecting anything to my fw800 port since i bought the powerbook (just over a year ago), so i'm worried that the 800 port isn't working right.

after resetting my pmu, no change. has anyone else had a problem like this? is there anything else i can try - besides buying another cable to use which i'm doing later today? any input would be great.

[ibook_steve]

Do these devices get power from the port or do they require an external power source? I have no idea, but maybe the FW800 port provides less power to devices than the FW400 port, requiring external power for those devices when connected to it. Enough power is provided to recognize the device, but not enough to spin it up. Just a guess.

Steve

[ericssonboi]

This happened to me with my USB hard drive too. The computer would recognize the drive.. but there would be not enough power to spin. I had to use external power in order for the hard drive to spin.