[porrid]

Upon restarting my iMac this morning and after the latest Security Update, (for Snow Leopard) the Sidebar of the Finder or Folder window neglects to show my Firewire External hard disks although the check mark is ticked to show them in the Sidebar Finder Preferences.

So how would I get them to show again ?

[porrid]

Update

Worth noting that the Firewire External hard disk (partitioned into Time Machine and Other) were present in the Sidebar before the Update.

Also worth noting that after the update the disks didn't appear in Disk Utility.

Apple System Profiler (ASP) showed that the Firewire was connected to an unrecognisable device ?

I then tried swapping other Firewire cables and the other Firewire port on the drive - all of these showed up in the ASP as being connected to an unrecognisable device !

But for the sake of the likely few remaining Snow Leopard users that may strike this issue the Mini USB port on the external drive, happily brought back the external drive, and thus my Time Machine, eureka !

Nevertheless I'm now left pondering whether Apple has dropped support and connectivity to Firewire ports and devices, or whether this issue pertains solely to my machine ?

[Waragainstsleep]

Apple will not deprecate a port like firewire which is still on shipping machines. They will support it until they remove it and its gone from all supported hardware.

Can you boot from DVD and check from disk utility if you can see the disks then? If so the driver is corrupted or something and you probably need to reinstall your OS.