Firewire and Tiger driving me nuts
okay, i'll spare you the long and gory troubleshooting details from last night, but here's the gist of things:
was having various firewire I/O errors. at first, thought it might be the isight, because i had read things on macfixit. removed it, but still problems. removed all firewire peripherals, and checked apple system profiler... which promptly crashed when examining JUST the firewire bus. ooookay. weird.
so i run disk utility over the disk. repair permissions. still problems. ran my applecare version of techtool deluxe over the disk, and no problems (though it doesn't check the firewire bus). finally, since i have a separate boot partition, i decide to take the "nuclear option" and wipe the boot drive back to 10.4.0 from my tiger dvd. no peripherals other than keyboard and mouse. STILL problems. oh, and also reset the PRAM somewhere along the way, y'know, just for old times' sake.
well, darn it, if i've already nuked back to 10.4.0, and also tried 10.4.4, let's crank the wayback machine to 10.3 and see what happens. so i did. even did a few combo updaters i still had around, AND even wen6 up to 10.3.9. guess what? apple system profiler WORKED FINE. no crashes. no weirdness. hooked stuff back up under 10.3.9, transferredfiles, ran my isight camera, and bruned a dvd on my external firewire dvd burner all at the same time with no errors.
so, for the heck of it, i disconnected all of that, upgraded to 10.4.0 and, of course, I/O errors and apple system profiler will not scan the bus AT ALL. i'm running a dual G4 1.25 GHz MDD (the last classic bootable, which has been a rock of stability since i have owned it, and plenty fast with all the ram i have in it and the geforce4 ti card).
so now i am suspecting that there is just something fundamentally whacked about tiger and firewire, between my own experiences and the reports i read on macfixit. anyone else noticing anything? i am desperately hoping 10.4.5 addresses these issues. all my firewire is the 400 variety, and since the macbook pros (or would that be macbooks pro?) have firewire 400 on them, i assume apple is going to support it for a while. i wonder if maybe apple started mucking with the firewire drivers t 10.4.0 knowing they would be going to intel boards/chips within the year? hmmm...
well, anyway, if anyone has some advice, i'd appreciate it. plus, are there any other utilities, or even terminal commands, where i can check the firewire bus WITHOUT using apple system profiler? thanks...
was having various firewire I/O errors. at first, thought it might be the isight, because i had read things on macfixit. removed it, but still problems. removed all firewire peripherals, and checked apple system profiler... which promptly crashed when examining JUST the firewire bus. ooookay. weird.
so i run disk utility over the disk. repair permissions. still problems. ran my applecare version of techtool deluxe over the disk, and no problems (though it doesn't check the firewire bus). finally, since i have a separate boot partition, i decide to take the "nuclear option" and wipe the boot drive back to 10.4.0 from my tiger dvd. no peripherals other than keyboard and mouse. STILL problems. oh, and also reset the PRAM somewhere along the way, y'know, just for old times' sake.
well, darn it, if i've already nuked back to 10.4.0, and also tried 10.4.4, let's crank the wayback machine to 10.3 and see what happens. so i did. even did a few combo updaters i still had around, AND even wen6 up to 10.3.9. guess what? apple system profiler WORKED FINE. no crashes. no weirdness. hooked stuff back up under 10.3.9, transferredfiles, ran my isight camera, and bruned a dvd on my external firewire dvd burner all at the same time with no errors.
so, for the heck of it, i disconnected all of that, upgraded to 10.4.0 and, of course, I/O errors and apple system profiler will not scan the bus AT ALL. i'm running a dual G4 1.25 GHz MDD (the last classic bootable, which has been a rock of stability since i have owned it, and plenty fast with all the ram i have in it and the geforce4 ti card).
so now i am suspecting that there is just something fundamentally whacked about tiger and firewire, between my own experiences and the reports i read on macfixit. anyone else noticing anything? i am desperately hoping 10.4.5 addresses these issues. all my firewire is the 400 variety, and since the macbook pros (or would that be macbooks pro?) have firewire 400 on them, i assume apple is going to support it for a while. i wonder if maybe apple started mucking with the firewire drivers t 10.4.0 knowing they would be going to intel boards/chips within the year? hmmm...
well, anyway, if anyone has some advice, i'd appreciate it. plus, are there any other utilities, or even terminal commands, where i can check the firewire bus WITHOUT using apple system profiler? thanks...
Comments
Originally posted by lundy
Regarding the PRAM, did you just zap it or actually reset the firmware? What about resetting the mobo with the CUDA switch? That's all I can think of for this bizarre problem - my MDD with Tiger has no problem with FireWire function.
y'know, i saw the switch in there when i was checking things inside to see if anything had gone bad, and thought about pressing it. i have heard that it artificially drains the motherboard battery quickly is used, but it can't be that bad with one press, right?
for now, i'm going to see if i can run some stuff under panther to get diagnostic info on the bus without everything crashing, and then i may try that next.