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is 10.4 killing firwire hard drives?

post #1 of 16
3/3/06 at 10:33pm
Thread Starter 
i have 2 firewire drives dead and a 3rd wigging out ever since i upgraded to 10.4.


is there a connection?

when i first upgraded i noticed the one drive seemed to drag down the performance of my tower when it was mounted.

not to worry - that drive was soon completely unuseable.


anyway,
has anyone heard of a connection between 10.4 and dead firewire drives?
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post #2 of 16
3/5/06 at 3:25pm
I have heard of people saying their FW drives were acting up under 10.4. Mine is showing some odd behaviour too. It uses a fair amount of CPU at times under the process kernel_task and it will occasionally unmount itself (but I think that's a drive issue).

One thing I make sure to do is put FW hard drives into the privacy section of spotlight. It takes ages to index mine and that can't be good for the drive. Dragging it into privacy prevents that.

It is odd that 2 of your drives have died. You don't happen to be in an excessively hot or humid environment do you? My Mini HD died after a heat wave and I'm almost certain that's what caused it.

If you have a FW enclosure without a fan, they could die more easily.
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post #3 of 16
3/5/06 at 3:45pm
Seriously? That's weird. I just had a hard drive die on me, first time in about 3 or 4 years. Figured it was just the luck of the draw. Turned out to be a problem with the bridge. I got the hard drive transferred to an external case and got all my data back. Don't know if 10.4 could have caused the power supply to burn out or something. Might have just been the odds catching up with me.
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post #4 of 16
3/10/06 at 6:39am
I'm using a B&W G3 running 10.4.5 (yeah I know its old but it still gets the job done). The B&W didn't come with a CD Burner and so I use an external CD Burner and it is a Firewire device. After upgrading from 10.2.8 to 10.4 I have had lots of Firewire related problems. My burner won't burn half the time but if I reboot into OS 9 it works perfect every time.

If I forget and leave my burner on and shut down my computer, the next time I start up the computer I will get a Kernel Panic. I also have problems with a HP scanner that uses Firewire. I'm not sure why 10.4 doesn't like Firewire but in my experience it doesn't always play well with Firewire.
http://whatifcartoons.com
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http://whatifcartoons.com
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post #5 of 16
3/10/06 at 7:26am
I had a G3 B&W with firewire HDD connected all the time with no problems.. I have a iMac now & I'm thinking of buying an external HDD... Should I get a USB 2.0 or a Hibrid?

p.s. I need @ least 250GB HDD
zenga
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zenga
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post #6 of 16
3/10/06 at 8:30am
Just had my firewire drive go the other day. Waiting for DiskWarrior to arrive-- hopefully it'll fix it.
There's no there there. But, I'm working on it.
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There's no there there. But, I'm working on it.
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post #7 of 16
3/12/06 at 6:51pm
My 250GB LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface works fine under Mac OS X 10.4.5. However, I bought it just last month.
Flickr, facebook. twitter.
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Flickr, facebook. twitter.
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post #8 of 16
4/4/06 at 8:35pm
Thread Starter 
now my main system drive is reporting permenant fatal errors.

thats 4 hard drives since upgrading to 10.4.

3 external,
1 internal.

thats a hell of a coincidence.
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post #9 of 16
4/5/06 at 12:08am
Quote:
Originally posted by bluesigns
now my main system drive is reporting permenant fatal errors.

thats 4 hard drives since upgrading to 10.4.

3 external,
1 internal.

thats a hell of a coincidence.

do you think maybe it has something to do with your Data? do you have a file or some form of data that might have been reiterated on the system, potentially causing a rare and fatal effect on your drives... unfortunate regardless but that would be the only scenario I could think of because I haven't heard of such things, typically only with interface issues.
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post #10 of 16
4/5/06 at 6:20am
You don't have Photoshop CS2 do you? It's supposed to screw up the drive. Only the filesystem I think though.

Are the drives actually dying with the clunking noises and such or do you mean the filesystem? Are able to reinstall the system?

If it is actually killing drives, I'd check out your power supply or maybe your hard drive supplier.
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post #11 of 16
4/5/06 at 12:24pm
Thread Starter 
reiterated data? i have no idea. what would i look for?

CS2?
yes, i have CS2 loaded on the system drive. i have to use CS2 for work.
i hadn't heard of CS2 killing drives. is there anything i can do about it?
also, the other external drives failed before CS2 was loaded.


this 4th {internal} drive hasn't failed 100% yet. i had opened Disk Utility to re-format a new 1394 drive when i noticed the main sytem drive was highlighted in RED.
the error message said that permanent fatal errors were detected in the HARDWARE and i should backup data immediately and REPLACE the internal drive.
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post #12 of 16
4/6/06 at 7:08am
Quote:
Originally posted by bluesigns
[B]CS2?
yes, i have CS2 loaded on the system drive. i have to use CS2 for work.
i hadn't heard of CS2 killing drives. is there anything i can do about it?
also, the other external drives failed before CS2 was loaded.

The CS2 installer has a file that OS X doesn't like and Adobe say you should fix it immediately as it eventually ruins the filesystem. Running disk utility shows up the error illegal name and applications show a vnode error. I don't think that's what is going on here though because you are getting a hardware fault. It sounds much more serious. If you are getting your drives from the same supplier (not drive make but shop I mean), I'd check them out. Possibly get your Mac down to a repair center. If the power supply is bad then it will be crapping out your drives.
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post #13 of 16
4/6/06 at 10:28am
Thread Starter 
RE: CS2
how do i fix the CS2 error?
run Disk Utility, identify the error...

and then what?

tia
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post #14 of 16
4/7/06 at 4:53am
Quote:
Originally posted by bluesigns
RE: CS2
how do i fix the CS2 error?
run Disk Utility, identify the error...

and then what?

tia

You can't repair the system volume while booted on it so you can boot from your system disc and run disk utility from that to repair the drive.

If you don't have the system disc handy, you can boot into single user mode.

It's pretty straightforward.
boot holding command-s, this will take you to a black screen with white text
then type fsck -f
Note, the fans might come on in single user mode, which is ok
it will do its thing and at the end, type reboot when it says to reboot.

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/332657.html
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post #15 of 16
4/7/06 at 8:05am
This is an interesting thread. I haven't had any drives die on me, but I have noticed that my Lacie d2 doesn't automatically turn off when the computer sleeps or shuts down. It used to.

I also have noticed that my Powerbook's internal drive does some odd things every once and a while. The other day it decided to just start chugging along doing something (very noisily) and then eventually stopped.

I wonder, does Spotlight have anything to do with this? Could it be that its cataloging is detrimental to the drive? I don't see how, but...

Living life in glorious 4G HD (with a 2GB data cap).
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Living life in glorious 4G HD (with a 2GB data cap).
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post #16 of 16
4/7/06 at 12:29pm
Quote:
Originally posted by CosmoNut
I also have noticed that my Powerbook's internal drive does some odd things every once and a while. The other day it decided to just start chugging along doing something (very noisily) and then eventually stopped.

I wonder, does Spotlight have anything to do with this? Could it be that its cataloging is detrimental to the drive? I don't see how, but...


I actually noticed my recently bought Lacie drive doing this now and again but I have the device in the privacy part of Spotlight so I think something else is doing it. It's a worrying noise because it doesn't do that even if I'm copying a huge file to it.
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