Dual Drives on One Firewire Port?

[Ozamandiz]

I recently purchased a Firewire Bridge board (small circuit board) that can support two IDE drives, one master and one slave--very common. When I connect the two drive to my G5 (running Tiger 10.4), it only sees one drive--the master.

If the master is removed, then the iMAC can see the slave drive. If the master is reconnected, then it can only see the master. When the board is connected to an IBM compatible PC, it can see both drives so the bridge board is working.

Does anyone know if this "one drive limit" is part of the Firewire implementation on the iMAC, or it is a limitation of the operating system?

Thanks for any information!

 

[evil_santa]

is there a 'master/slave' jumper on the ide drives? one will have to be set to master the other to slave.

 

[Heb1228]

I agree that jumper settings should be the first thing you explore. If the ones above suggested don't work, try other combinations. I bet one of them will work properly.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Does anyone know if this "one drive limit" is part of the Firewire implementation on the iMAC, or it is a limitation of the operating system?

No, there is no such limit in Mac hardware or software. For example, the LaCie Big Disk Extremes are all 2-drive enclosures. WiebeTech and Granite also have dual and 4-drive FW enclosures. The problem is between your bridge board and your drives. Go back to the bridge board manual and start again. Does the Bridge board support Mac? What quality is it?

 

[solvs]

If they're both set to cable select, change it to master and slave. If it's m and s, change to cs. I forget which is better on the Mac, but that's probably your problem. Any fw bridge should be compatible with Macs.

 

[Bear]

If they're both set to cable select, change it to master and slave. If it's m and s, change to cs. I forget which is better on the Mac, but that's probably your problem. Any fw bridge should be compatible with Macs.

Internally, the Mac uses Cable Select. The firewaire bridge would have its own requirements since it's talking to the drives.

Some drives have different jumpers for "Master" and "Master with Slave", also if the drives are not the same model, try switching which one is set to be the master - not all drives are created equal.

 

[carpe diem]

just daisy chain them.