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AURACLE · Mar 8, 2003, 11:07 PM

Something very weird just happened tonight. My not-old-at-all external FireWire hard drive decided, out of nowhere, to just stop working. A dialog box came up on my screen stating that the device had not been put away properly - but I hadn't done anything to it. It wasn't being accessed, I wasn't taking anything off it or putting anything onto it - it was just sitting there as it normally does, and then suddenly it was just...gone.

It had been mounted on the desktop, and now it's not, and the Apple System Profiler doesn't recognize that anything is plugged into the FireWire port.

Can anyone tell me what the hell has happened here, and if there's any chance at all that I can get it work again? I haven't been using it long enough for it to just die like this.

-- Jeff

Macola · Mar 8, 2003, 11:11 PM

This happened to me with a Maxtor 40GB after a history of problems (I now avoid all Maxtor FW drives). If you can boot into OS 9, try running Diskwarrior. Otherwise, you can try removing the drive from the case, use it as an internal IDE drive, and run the OS X Disk Utility.

nonhuman · Mar 9, 2003, 03:45 AM

I think that the Maxtor FireWire enclosures have some problems. I got a Maxtor external FireWire 80 gig a long time ago, and I had a lot of problems with it unmounting whenever I plugged in or unplugged another FireWire device (like, say, and iPod). At the time, I thought the problem was likely due to immagure FireWire support in OS X, but I've recently started using the enclosure again (under 10.2.4 with a Maxtor 140 gig drive) and am having the same problems (although it no longer causes kernel panics as it once did). Once I get my PC motherboard repaired I think I'm going to just put the 140 in there and mount it from Linux with NFS on my Mac.

AURACLE · Mar 11, 2003, 10:34 PM

More weirdness: the drive started working again today, only to just go out on me again tonight.

Very bizarre.

-- Jeff

all2ofme · Mar 12, 2003, 06:03 AM

I had the same happen to me on a Maxtor 80GB FW drive (with their own enclosure), and then later on with a Maxtor 100GB drive in an enclosure that I got ready-assembled from transintl.com.

The first one I got a refund for, the second one I reformatted (it's worked fine for a friend ever since).

I have a hunch from other experiences that I've read about that Diskwarrior would have fixed both of them, but I didn't have it to try.

rockhaus · Mar 12, 2003, 08:46 AM

I've had the same experience with my Maxtor 160GB. Haven't tried DiskWarrior yet, but I was able to get TiBook to recognize it - and reliably prevent the same specific problem from reoccuring, by approving Drive 10's analysis and letting it repair all my drives.

Please note that I've not upgraded Drive 10 beyond 1.1.2, as I read some bad news about 1.2.3 on another forum.

I've found 1.1.2 to also (slowly) do a nice a job of defragging all my drives.

That was before I accidently blew my Firewire altogether.

See my post here under Peripherals re: NOT plug and play.

Most do not have these problems, but now, I also power everything down before plugging or unplugging Firewire cables...

HTH

AURACLE · Mar 12, 2003, 08:54 AM

Stranger still: the drive is working again. I saved all the important stuff that I had on it to my new flat-panel iMac's 60 GB hard drive just in case the external goes all weird on me again.

Bizarre.

-- Jeff

rockhaus · Mar 12, 2003, 11:27 AM

I checked my notes, and, my bad, before my firewire fiasco started, I'd upgraded to OSX 10.2.3 Drive 10, then, no longer recognized my external drives, when firewire was still working.

So, I hear DiskWarrior is highly recommended for stuff.

But click below. It has literally exploded in the last week. Some may relate to your experience.

We are not alone.

http://www.macintouch.com/firewirereader02.html

then search the page for the word 'mount'.

-r

Macola · Mar 12, 2003, 03:54 PM

Firewire in general seems problematic on my TiBook/400 in OS X ever since 10.1.x (I never used 10.0 but it was probably worse). I read somewhere that some first-generation TiBooks have flaky Firewire buses, and I blamed the problems on that. However, it seems that many others are having similar problems so I'm glad it's not just me.

It almost makes me long for the good ol' days of SCSI

rockhaus · Mar 13, 2003, 09:59 AM

Another thing I heard is that you can just unplug your disappeared maxtor from the wall, plug it back in, and maybe it will mount. I tried this once after unmounting it properly, just to see, and it came back fine.

lavar78 · Mar 14, 2003, 12:04 AM

Another thing I heard is that you can just unplug your disappeared maxtor from the wall, plug it back in, and maybe it will mount. I tried this once after unmounting it properly, just to see, and it came back fine.

I concur. In the last year, I've had this problem about 3 or 4 times and this has always fixed it (you know, until it happened again).

lavar78 · Mar 18, 2003, 12:12 PM

My drive has been disappearing more and more frequently. Every time I unplugged it and plugged it in again, it would reappear and I'd try to copy the contents onto my G4 ... only to have it disappear again. After I calmed down (heh), I discovered that the drive works much better when nothing else is plugged into the other FW plug. After removing my Dazzle Hollywood Bridge, the drive (Maxtor 80GB, BTW) has worked perfectly.

cdhostage · Mar 18, 2003, 03:18 PM

Two years ago, I bought a top-of-the-friggin line 80 GB FireWire hard drive from Maxtor for $400. Maxtor sucks giant donkey balls. It worked for six weeks then started continually showing that little red light when plugged in, not spinning up, not responsing to Apple System Info, not even showing up in OS 9. Sucks bad. I hate Maxtor.