Bizarre Firewire issue after upgrading RAM on Intel Mac Mini

[daviestar]

Hi All

I recently had to take my mac mini to pieces to upgrade its RAM to 2GB. I initially had problems with booting up - it would get to the white screen with the apple logo and think for about 2 minutes then restart and repeat the process indefinitely. I managed to fix this by removing the clock battery for a while. I also zapped the PRAM after installing.

But now, the strange problem is that OS X wont boot up (it will get to the white screen, think, then restart) if my firewire devices are connected. In case this helps, I have two HDDs and a DVD burner connected in daisychain to the firewire port. It definitely boots up fine with any other peripherals/connections. Once OS X has booted successfully, I can then connect my Firewire devices which seem to work fine.

I have tested my new RAM with memtest and rember and everything seems fine.

After upgrading my RAM, I would also get two alerts on start up -

"Do you want the application "configd" to accept incoming network connections"

and

"Do you want the application "mdnsresponder" to accept incoming network connections ".

I have fixed this problem with the help of this post:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/406592/

Aside from the horrible idea that I have damaged some hardware, does anyone have any clues as to how I can mend this?

A wise colleage of mine said that if it was a windows machine, he would look at the BIOS settings as he thinks my computer is trying to boot from one of the HDDs, and that I should try to find a list of boot drives and remove the firewire HDDs if they're on it. I know macs don't run BIOS, but is there anything similar I could check?

If anyone has any idea why these issues would affect my firewire devices, please help me!

Thanks,

Dave

 

[JediMeister]

With the FireWire drives connected, I would hold down on the option key on the keyboard to bring up the startup manager, and make sure the internal drive is selected. Also go the Startup Disk pane in System Preferences and make sure the one default-highlighted is the internal drive.

 

[daviestar]

Thanks JediMeister

Thanks

Issue has been resolved. One of my Firewire HDDs was in the list of boot drives in the Startup Disk prefpane, so I made sure my internal HDD was selected. I did the same with the interface which comes up when you start up holding the option key.

It seemed strange that only one firewire hard drive would show up in the Startup Disk prefpane when they are identical and neither has an OS X setup on them. When holding down the option key at start up, one had its custom icon and name, and the other had a default icon and was named 'PC' which is not its name in Leopard. It turns out the one named PC is formatted in FAT32, and the other is Mac OS Extended formatted.

So I suppose a solution if this is a persistent problem would be to format the offending HDD in FAT32 so it wouldn't get on the boot list in the first place.

Thanks again