[prolix]

I have this firewire drive I gave up on long ago, however I need to back up some stuff so I got the drive out to see if it was still acting up.

Anyway, its an external FW drive, oxford 911 bridge. I've got a 40 gig IDE drive in the case, the drive is good, I just pulled it from one of my PC's.

I plug the drive in and turn on the power and its fine for a few minutes then it just disconnects and the drive spins down. The amount of time it takes varies, but it does it consistantly on every system I've tried. The drive is usb2/firewire and does it on both interfaces. Does it on my G5, my powerbook and my PC.

I just re-flashed the chipset with the latest firmware, flashed fine, zero errors. Does anyone have any idea what would cause a drive to do this? I've also swapped the HD inside the case and that makes no difference. Is there some setting in the firmware that would cause it to act like this?

I did search the web and a fair number of people were complaining of similar issues on PC's, however mine happens on both PC and Mac. No solutions though

[israces]

Originally posted by prolix:
I have this firewire drive I gave up on long ago, however I need to back up some stuff so I got the drive out to see if it was still acting up.

Anyway, its an external FW drive, oxford 911 bridge. I've got a 40 gig IDE drive in the case, the drive is good, I just pulled it from one of my PC's.

I plug the drive in and turn on the power and its fine for a few minutes then it just disconnects and the drive spins down. The amount of time it takes varies, but it does it consistantly on every system I've tried. The drive is usb2/firewire and does it on both interfaces. Does it on my G5, my powerbook and my PC.

I just re-flashed the chipset with the latest firmware, flashed fine, zero errors. Does anyone have any idea what would cause a drive to do this? I've also swapped the HD inside the case and that makes no difference. Is there some setting in the firmware that would cause it to act like this?

I did search the web and a fair number of people were complaining of similar issues on PC's, however mine happens on both PC and Mac. No solutions though

Similar stuff happeneing to me too. I'm wondering if the bus is losing power for some reason.

[prolix]

Thats what I'm wondering, maybe the powerboard in the drive case is going bad or something. Its definitley not the bus on the computer b/c it does it on every system I have. Unless for some reasons the computers do power down the internal bus for some reason? That doesn't make any sense though, especially since its done it while processes were actually using the external drive.

I did get into the firmware settings for the oxford chipset, however nothing there seemed to have anything to do with bus power.

This is definitely frustrating. I'd buy another external chassis if this one is bad, but it seems other people have these same problems and there is no real clear reason for it. I don't want two external cases that do the same thing..

[prolix]

no other opinions?

the bus power is looking more and more like the cause, however i'm not sure if its a physical problem with the device or if its some feature thats enabled or being triggered for some reason...

[Senbei]

I have this same problem with an OWC Mercury Firewire (400) external. It is very intermittent and it sometimes does not manifest itself for a few weeks while other times, might be a few days or even hours. It has a Maxtor 250gb in it and Oxford 911 bridge (flashed with the latest firmware from OWC). I also have a Transintl Firewire also with an Oxford 911 bridge and a WD100 which has given me zero problems for several years now.

I was able to finally rule out the hard drives since I swapped them. It took awhile to test since this was one of those times where it kept working. Finally got a disconnect with the OWC when burning a DVD. I had several more of these disconnects. The Maxtor now in the Transintl case still has not had the same problems when it was in the OWC case for the past 2 months.

I also ruled out the power cords and firewire cables since I also tried swapping them.