Daisy chaining and firewire

lukeb

I recently daisy chained two external hard drives to a 12 inch Powerbook 1.5 running 10.3.9 through a Belkin 4 port firewire hub. Since the machine only has one firewire port I need to use the hub to hook up my drives, scanner, and ipod simultaneously.



It was working fine until I removed the battery today (to see if it needed to be replaced as part of the battery recall) and when I restarted the powerbook back it froze halfway through startup. It gave the multi-lingual warning/suggestion that I needed to restart.



Working my way back I discovered that neither the hub nor the daisy chain techniques work now, though I can hook up one device at a time.



Any idea why this would happen?



Is there some way to reset the firewire?



Many thanks,

Luke

maccrazy

Try a permissions repair - daisy chaining has always worked fine for me and I unplugged my battery while using it to check today as well!

lukeb

Nope, reparing permissions did not effect the outcome: still crashed.



It seems like it is adding the second external hard drive that makes the conflict.



Reformat drive?

maccrazy

Quote:

Originally posted by lukeb

Nope, reparing permissions did not effect the outcome: still crashed.



It seems like it is adding the second external hard drive that makes the conflict.



Reformat drive?

There could be a corruption, yes. What happens if you add the third drive second?

lukeb

Yes, if I add the third drive, a Maxtor 160GB, it crashes the system.

I recently reformatted it, but maybe I will do a zero level reformatting and see if that helps...

maccrazy

Well if it crashes when you plug either drive second there may be a problem with the computer - not the HD. Try plugging in the other drives and not the first one.