FireWire is toast :(
i was plugging in my external drive (2.5 inch bus powered) and my computer (867 g4) suddenly shut off. upon restarting, i noticed that my ipod, nor my other external drive was mounting, yet the ipod was charging.
i opened system profiler and clicked firewire, only to see it say "No information found".
im assuming that my ports are dead and am going to buy a usb2/fw card, but i want to know if this may cause other problems for me
i opened system profiler and clicked firewire, only to see it say "No information found".
im assuming that my ports are dead and am going to buy a usb2/fw card, but i want to know if this may cause other problems for me
Comments
i now get sent straight to open firmware, witht the following message when i try to type "mac-boot":
Default catch!, code=300 at %SRR0: ff849480 %SRR1: 0000b030
help
Originally posted by ThunderPoit
i was plugging in my external drive (2.5 inch bus powered) and my computer (867 g4) suddenly shut off. upon restarting, i noticed that my ipod, nor my other external drive was mounting, yet the ipod was charging.
This sounds nastily similar to a recent series of events I experienced with a home-brew PC.
I bought a case that had a front panel FireWire port. It took a little work to get that port connected because it didn't have a simple connector to plug into anything, it had six separate wires with individual pin-header connectors on each. I had to make a homemade adapter to connect the individual wires to a plug cut off the end of a spare FireWire cable.
I proceeded to burn out both a cheap ($18) FireWire board and a (not so cheap) 20 GB iPod when I tried this port for the first time. The symptoms were just as you describe.
I fixed the iPod by getting a friendly fellow AI-er to sell me an old 5 GB iPod with a broken drive for $40, connecting my 20 GB drive to the 5-gigger's electronics, a spending many, many hours and another $10 on finding the right tool (a Dremel diamond cutting wheel) to cut and adapt the steel part of the 20 GB iPod case to the plastic part of the 5 GB case.
I had a one-of-kind FrankenPod, 20 GBs with push buttons and non-solid state scroll wheel, that was working for a total of maybe 6 hours...
After double, triple, and quadruple checking my wiring, I tried the front panel FireWire port again. Result: Another dead FireWire card, a dead-again iPod.
I went over the problem again and again and again. It was a total mystery until I discovered something completely by chance: a short registered between two of the leads to the front-panel port. I'd already checked many times for shorts, and hadn't see one, but this time I did.
Eventually, I narrowed the short down to the FireWire port itself... nothing to do with my wiring or the FireWire cards I was using! The port itself had an intermittent short! I hate problems like that... the problem completely defied even the most careful testing, so no matter how careful I was, the short could be, and was, hiding from me until it was too late.
The physical act of plugging in a connector turned out to be a great way to cause this short to occur, and even then, I had to monitor the two pins that were shorting out while plugging in a cable, because the short was typically only momentary while plugging the cable in.
Perhaps you are experiencing a similar short circuit. One of the lines in a FireWire connector is for power, and it turns out that if this power lead accidentally gets fed into any one of the signal leads, it's a Bad Thing.
i restarted, and now everything is fine, firewire ports and all. only thing thats not working is the belkin 3 port FW card i got
you have to unplug and power down ALL devices that were connected in a chain.
remove all firewire cables.
power the machine up, then plug the drives back in one by one. suddenly everything is happy again.