Am I overloading my FireWire bus?

I'm not quite clear if your "little" LaCie is bus powered or not; if it is, you could well be overloading things by plugging it and the iPod in at the same time... but that's not the symptom I'd expect to see.

It sounds more like one of the devices just isn't playing well with others--you SHOULD (in theory) be able to chain 63 devices on a single FW bus, but if something is misbehaving, it's quite possible that plugging it in along with something else could cause symptoms like that.

 

Firewire can be quirky like this. I have 5 devices on one FW400 bus. I have them chained up like this: Mac -> EyeTV -> Oxford 911 drive -> audio interface -> DVD burner -> DV cam. Sometimes the audio interface (apparently) will "freeze" the bus. I've tried hooking them up in alternate order and when I had the DVD burner closer to the Mac, the whole chain wouldn't work. And so on and so forth... So I suspect your problem is a cheap Taiwanese FW chipset somewhere in the chain. It could be in one or both of the Lacie drives. Oxford chipsets are known to be reliable, but are also the most expensive, and Lacie doesn't make its own chipsets, or drives, which means they may have gone the cheap route to increase margins. Maybe see if you can find out what chipsets your drives use. If it says Oxford then your problem is probably something else, if it says Prolific or Genesys (known crap chipsets) then you likely know what your problem is.

 

I think I read somewhere that the new intel macs only support os booting through usb2 not firewire anymore. I could be wrong though.

 

i had a similar problem with my collection of firewire devices. I have 3 hard drives 2 dv sources (up to 4 depending on how painfully old the format is) and an ipod that get plugged in regularly.. I solved my issues with a 40$ fw hub from compusa.

i still run 2 of my hard drives daisy-chain on the fw800 into the fw400 of the other drive. I'm too cheap to buy more cables, but it works just fine.

 

I had a problem with a Genesys chipset external drive... It would randomly decide when it wanted to mount... I put the drive in an Oxford 911 chipset case, and now it works perfectly every time.

 

I know that it is not really in the scope of this post, since the OP isn't booting off an external drive, but I believe what you read somewhere was that the new iPods won't boot off firewire. The Intel iMacs definitely will boot off firewire, but you may run into problems because the EFI in the Intel iMac requires a different partition scheme than PowerPC computers did, therefore, a PowerPC bootable drive will not be bootable under Intel, and vice versa.