My brother-in-law bought an external drive to use with his daughter's iBook. The drive is a Western Digital with firewire and USB. He couldn't get it to mount on the iBook using firewire so he wanted me to try it with my computer (I use a Maxtor external with firewire). His drive wouldn't mount on my Macbook using his cable or mine. My drive did mount on his iBook, but only once. When we checked a different firewire cable the drive didn't mount and now would not mount using either firewire cable (USB did work).<br><br>What's wierd is that now my external drive won't mount with firewire on either of my machines, MacBook or G4, (where there had been no problem) but will mount with USB.<br><br>A different external drive with firewire mounts fine on both of my machines so the machines seem ok.<br><br>Any ideas why my drive, after testing his drive, no longer works with firewire? <br><br>Old farts, the hidden caulk of civilization. Jim Atkinson<br><br>

Sounds like faulty FW bridges in both enclosures.<br><br><br>

Coincidentally, I've been researching FW drive issues and have discovered there's a MAJOR problem with Prolific chipsets. Many enclosure manufacturers have switched from Oxford to Prolific for economic reasons. Prolific is distributing these falsely GUID'd chipsets. The problems stem from all the chipsets having the same serial number in the GUID. This is VERY bad!!! I have two recently purchased Macally FW enclosures suffering from the problems incurred by these chipsets.<br><br>By the way, a restart will likely allow you to mount the individual drives again.<br><br>- alec -

If I connect my MacBook to my other wirefire external drive, using the same cable, everything works fine. My external drives are self-contained Maxtor drives that worked perfectly until today.<br><br>My problem drive was fine until we experimented with my brother-in-law's external drive, iBook and my drive. Now my problem drive doesn't even appear in System Profiler Firewire. There have been several restarts today without joy. <br><br><br>Old farts, the hidden caulk of civilization. Jim Atkinson<br><br>

I had an external drive that the FW bridge (Oxford chipset) began too fail at the same time I upgraded to Leopard. It caused numerous read errors while Migration Assistant ran which resulted in an incomplete transfer (it also would not boot although it was a bootable volume). I plugged it in using the USB 2.0 interface and it worked just fine. I bought another enclosure which is working perfectly well with FW using the same HDD.<br><br>Can Disk Utility "see" the drive?<br><br><br>

When connected by firewire, Disk Utility doesn't see the drive and System Profiler doesn't see it either. When connected with USB it works fine, including the bootable partition (2 partitions on the drive).<br><br>Old farts, the hidden caulk of civilization. Jim Atkinson<br><br>

Wow, I've been having problems with recent MacAlly and other Firewire enclosures. That explains a lot. Man, Prolific ought to give us our money back!<br><br>Eric<br><br>I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it. - Mark Twain<br>