firewire drive unmounts on heavy read/write use

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Powermac G4 - SP 1.25 ghz

786 mb RAM



Firewire drive-

OWC mercury 80 gig

oxford 911 chipset running most recent firmware from OWC



0S 9.2.2 & OS X 10.2.6



Computer started crashing while recording in protools to the firewire drive (have had the drive for a year or 2 no problems).

Now drive unmounts randomly when it is under heavy read/write use under X as well as 9. I've ran disk utilities on it (disk first aid & norton) and found no problems. I bought another drive and backed it up already, now i'm trying to figure out what's making it unmount.

Turning it off and then on again brings it back up and mounts but as soon as it is put to work, it unmounts again.



I have also reset PRAM... repaired privledges.. im lost. Please help. thank you.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    dmband0026dmband0026 Posts: 2,345member
    I can't help you much with the unmount problem, but a good first step would be to get rid of Norton and never use it again.

    Rule #1 with OS X = Norton is the devil.

    If anything, pick up a copy of diskwarrior, I don't know if that'll help you with the problems you are having now, but it's about a billion times better than Norton.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    miami craigmiami craig Posts: 172member
    bump
  • Reply 3 of 7
    formerlurkerformerlurker Posts: 2,686member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Miami Craig

    bump



    boot into Open Transport and then type

    reset-nvram <return>

    then type

    reset-all <return>



    also - as you say it's backed up, have you tried re-formatting?
  • Reply 4 of 7
    Quote:

    Originally posted by FormerLurker

    boot into Open Transport and then type

    reset-nvram <return>

    then type

    reset-all <return>



    also - as you say it's backed up, have you tried re-formatting?






    1: how do you boot into open transport



    2: what does reset the nvram do exactly?



    no i havent tried reformating. will do next.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    gardnerjgardnerj Posts: 167member
    if this reaches you before you have reformated your drive i think the thing to do is to use /sbin/fsck in terminal. Not sure of the exact flags in OSX but i have used on a lot of other unix flavours to rebuild stymied filesystems and its not as final as formating. The only other thing I can think is that it might be dodgy cable...



    For more info on fsck go into terminal and type "man fsck".



    Actually i just looked at the faqs at the top of the page. they have more info on running fsck too. Nice touch btw, shows how long it is since i've been in here.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    mmmpiemmmpie Posts: 628member
    I get the feeling firewire drives have as much voodoo as scsi did



    First, your drive is 2 years old, so it is certainly reached the point where failure is an option. I would recommend backing up, buying a new drive at comp usa, and putting that in the enclosure. Throw out the old drive. It might be fine, it might not. How much time is it worth screwing around with it?



    My firewire drive would overheat with sustained transfers. Do a couple of hundred megs, and it would just stop ( activity ligth frozen on ). If I used it with USB 1 it would go all day. I recently upgraded to panther, and the issue seems to have gone away. But I still swapped my drives around so that the external is a cooler running one.



    If you have had any sort of environmental change then that might be the cause of the problem. Also try opening the enclosure and cleaning out any dust. Check the temp of the drive while its running. If its nearly too hot to touch then that could be causing the problem. Drives that have overheated are also likely to have permanent problems as a result.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by mmmpie

    I get the feeling firewire drives have as much voodoo as scsi did



    Oh not *even*.



    SCSI regularly required sacrificing goats (black for hardware, white for drivers).



    With FireWire you can get away with the occasional incense.
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