I just picked up a new USB/firewire external hard drive that's going to be used for audio recording, and I'm having problems right out of the box. I've got a 24" iMac 2.4ghz and a brand new black MacBook, and with a firewire connection, the hard drive is recognised by the MacBook, but not the iMac. I'll plug it in and it'll spin up, but it won't mount -- I checked the System Profiler and it said "unable to list firewire devices" and told me that the maximum speed was 800MB/sec. I was thinking that the problem could be a bad firewire jack on the iMac, but I tried another firewire device (a PreSonus FirePod audio interface) on both computers and it worked fine. The drive works with a USB connection, but I'm not willing to sacrifice any performance. I've been tooling around with it for the past five hours to no avail... I reset the SMC as well as the PRAM, and I've also tried a slew of different cables with no results. Both systems are running 10.5.3. My next step is to take the hard drive back in the morning and swap it out with a new one, since it seems it's a problem with the drive. Is there anything I should try before taking it back?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
External hard drive/firewire woes.
- Thread starter xxdeliverance
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
A trick that used to work with laptops (there's an Apple technote about this somewhere) is to power down the computer and leave in unplugged for 5 minutes or so, then try again.
Sounds crazy, I know, but apparently this resets something having to do with the firewire port, which may help. (I've seen this work a couple of times.)
Sounds crazy, I know, but apparently this resets something having to do with the firewire port, which may help. (I've seen this work a couple of times.)
Bah. Ran hardware diagnostics and everything's fine, I also tested it on two PC's I have laying around. No dice. The only computer I can get it to work on is the MacBook.
What type of drive is it? There are known issues with aluminium iMacs not recognising Western Digital MyBook drives. Apple and WD are working on this. Updating the firmware of the drive might solve the problem (and perhaps OS 10.5.4 might bring a solution).
Hope this helps.
Hope this helps.
The problem is on the iMac, not the laptop
Right, so of course it won't work with a desktop, since desktop firewire is so different from laptop firewire.