[neilw]

I'll take anything from informed opinion to wild speculation on this.

I have an IBM 40GNX in an external firewire enclosure that I was setting up and priming to be placed in my TiBook. So I had it all loaded up, had booted from it and was running from it (to verify all was working), and then all of a sudden it hung. Permanently. The computer (now booting off its internal drive) cannot see the disk at all; not even disk utility can see it, so it's not like I can just reformat it and start over. In fact, if I start disk utility with the firewire drive connected, it shows "0 Disks and 0 Volumes selected", so the external drive seems to be screwing up the whole works.

Firewire in general still works; my external CD-RW functions as before.

So, does this sound like the problem is with the hard disk or the firewire enclosure? If the latter, I could solve the problem by just installing the drive into my TiBook; it was basically ready to go before it went into z-space. Unfortunately, I don't have either another enclosure or another drive to try to isolate the problem.

I'd hate to install it into the TiBook and then find it really was the drive, but then sitting here staring at the thing isn't too great either.

Any thoughts?

[rockhaus]

if you are running OSX 10.2.2 or earlier, try running Drive 10v 1.1.2 (i read bad things about 1.1.3).

Let it make the repairs. This worked for me in the exact same situation.

In OSX 10.2.3., Drive 10 no longer recognized any firewire drive.

I hear DiskWarrior is good, too.

Your drive and data are probably fine. Get another enclosure, one that is wall-powered. Yes, that means less portability, but it's not hard to install a bigger drive inside TiBook, if you have patience with yourself and small fingers. Get the instructions from Apple.com/Support.

Because your TiBook might have only one firewire port, I'm guessing you ran a bus-powered enclosure downstream from your CDRW. This is very unwise, I have learned, the hard way.

Good luck.

[neilw]

I am indeed running the firewire drive bus-powered downstream from the CDRW. There seemed to be no reason not to.

I just tried hooking up the external power supply to the HD enclosure, and it behaves at least a little differently now: now disk utility can see the disk and its partitions, but it thinks the disk is unformatted, and won't mount them. So my old copy of Diskwarrior can't see them; don't have Drive10.

I'm thinking I'll probably just try putting the disk in my TiBook, and if it doesn't work, I'll swap the old one back in.

[neilw]

Well, this is certainly strange.

I swapped the drives between my TiBook and the external enclosure. Now they *both* work fine.

I'm happy, I guess, but I'm sure at a loss to understand this...

[rockhaus]

I'm sure you tried it, but I forgot to suggest plugging the bus-powered enclosure directly into your Ti's port, to see if there's A) Power (Drive Spins) and B) Data (some software can see it, or it mounts).

The only reason I can imagine that the bus-powered enclosure is now working at all - regardless of which drive is in it - is because you had your battery disconnected for a time.

This may have reset your power mgmt unit (PMU), which switched bus power back on.

I know it is hard to imagine the inherent dangers in non-self-powered FW devices;

There is a huge problem with many victims.

Again, plunk down for an enclosure with a power supply (like your CDRW). It's to protect all your ports!!

Also, you may get by with 4-wire (or is it 2? I'm not sure, I am a bit cornfused myself) FW cables that do NOT carry bus power - just data.

The problem with bus powered devices is discussed better here...

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

and it has exploded since 10.2.4. There is a lot to read, not all of it pertains to you, but fair warning.

Bottom line - power down. Never hot-swap cables. Your problem is (was) unpredictable. Not knowing the cause doesn't inspire confidence. If you are more careful it may not return

HTH.

[rockhaus]

Sorry.

On second thought, after re-reading your original post, I may have been off track in my last post re: PMU and PMU only.

I bet you you would benefit by running a good disk repair utility o both drives. If you did - then there's your answer.

I assume the newer drive is bigger than the original TiBook drive.

You said the bigger drive wasn't 'there' when booting from the smaller internal (before the swap).

Given all you've described, that actually sounds like a problem on the smaller drive that may still be around.

Try booting off the smaller drive again to see if it still can't 'see' the big one.

Are you using Carbon Copy Cloner to backup a boot drive??

I highly recommend.

[neilw]

The whole issue of the dangers of hot-swapping Firewire drives is interesting, and I'll do some more reading. Thanks for the links. In any case, here's more info than anyone wants to know about my setup:

1) I was using Carbon Copy Cloner to configure the new drive. It worked fine, and as I mentioned I was able to boot off the new drive (in external enclosure) and use it for a while before it suddenly disappeared in mid-use.

2) When it was gone, I couldn't access the external drive at all, with anything. So I was unable to run any disk utiliities on it to see if anything was wrong on the disk itself. At that time I was still able to boot off the internal drive and run fine with it (fsck checked with no errors.)

3) I did try going Firewire straight from the TiBook to the external drive. It made no difference, vs. connecting through the CD-RW.

4) My external drive does have an external supply; I'm now running off it to help fend off further problems, but I wish it didn't have to be on all the time (there's no on-off switch or anything.) When I switched to using the external supply, I found that the drive would then be consistently recognized by the system as "unrecognizable", which was actually better than before, when it wouldn't be acknowledged at all.

5) It seems unlikely to me that just being powered down for a while fixed the problem, because the external drive had already been powered down for extensive stretches while I was debugging this problem. Unless there's something in there I'm not seeing.

6) I haven't tried booting off the smaller drive in the external enclosure yet; I'm scared to. From a pure experimental standpoint, it'd probably be a good thing to do, but at this point I'm probably more interested in having it all work than anything.

And that's about it, more than anyone wanted to know. Maybe the whole Firewire chain could use an extra infusion of robustness, but at least I'm working for now.