Firewire 800 Panther Patches

[jxyama]

ok, i'm getting a little paranoid... i just clean installed panther last night after cloning my old jaguar on my 40 GB FW400 disk. it would be catastrophic to lose info on my FWHD...

i have opened up my enclosure and found out it's Oxford 911. does anyone else have absolutely reputable information that 911-based HD's can be doomed by panther?

also, my disk is made by Adtec, a japanese company. i bought this disk in japan. it's not very clear what version of firmware this one is running. the closest i see in the apple system profiler is "Unit SW Version: 10483." (See image on next post.)

could someone else check their FW400 HDs to see what kind of information they see on the system profiler? thanks.

 

[jxyama]

image:

 

[daveL]

Originally posted by jxyama
ok, i'm getting a little paranoid... i just clean installed panther last night after cloning my old jaguar on my 40 GB FW400 disk. it would be catastrophic to lose info on my FWHD...

i have opened up my enclosure and found out it's Oxford 911. does anyone else have absolutely reputable information that 911-based HD's can be doomed by panther?

also, my disk is made by Adtec, a japanese company. i bought this disk in japan. it's not very clear what version of firmware this one is running. the closest i see in the apple system profiler is "Unit SW Version: 10483." (See image on next post.)

could someone else check their FW400 HDs to see what kind of information they see on the system profiler? thanks.

Just to clarify, the firmware revs being discussed are for the Oxford 911 and 922 ide/fw/usb2 bridge chips, not the actual hard drive (ide/ata).

 

[jxyama]

yeah, sorry, it was the bridge chip inside the enclosure that was labeled as Oxford 911... not the 2.5" HD itself.

 

[q1232]

Originally posted by q1232
Just last night I lost my second Maxtor drive in a Mercury Elite Firewire 400 case. Before Panther I never had a problem with the case using several different drives. Now in the matter of 2 days I have lost 2 drives. They don't even show up at all when I plug everything in. Time to troubleshoot at the Apple store.

Looks like it wasn't Panther. It turns out that the drive was not getting enough power from the power strip. I was able to successfully reproduce the problem numerous times and simply by plugging it into a different outlet fixed all problems.

 

[daveL]

Originally posted by q1232
Looks like it wasn't Panther. It turns out that the drive was not getting enough power from the power strip. I was able to successfully reproduce the problem numerous times and simply by plugging it into a different outlet fixed all problems.

Good to hear!

Over on Hardmac they're saying you either get bit early in the game or you're OK. So, if you've rebooted a couple times and haven't experienced any problems, there's evidence to indicate you won't have any problems.

 

[Doctor Q]

According to Mike Mihalik at LaCie, between Jaguar and Panther Apple changed the sequence of commands used to communicate with hard drives. He said whether or not you run into problems also depends on the drive mechanism and how long it takes to spin down or disconnect from the FireWire bus. This is from a MacCentral article.

 

[Fofer]

Originally posted by daveL
Good to hear!

Over on Hardmac they're saying you either get bit early in the game or you're OK. So, if you've rebooted a couple times and haven't experienced any problems, there's evidence to indicate you won't have any problems.

That's not what this guy said, from the same MacCentral article linked above...

"I upgraded to Panther on the day of release and the FireWire drive worked without a problem for the first two days, then I started getting an error message," said Davidhazy.

This is some scary stuff. I've got thousands of users waiting for Apple to make it safe for them to simply PLUG IN their hard drives, with years of data on them... and Apple's staying mum.

Will we ever feel safe again?

 

[jxyama]

Originally posted by Fofer
This is some scary stuff. I've got thousands of users waiting for Apple to make it safe for them to simply PLUG IN their hard drives, with years of data on them... and Apple's staying mum.

i agree, this is not like a new product launch. apple NEEDS to keep everyone informed the best they can as things get uncovered. it is not enough to internally investigate and publish a solution when it's found.

i am glad they were swift with FW800 problem, but users need to be informed. it's a lot better than reading FUD-ish information from various places. apple should send out a warning that FW400 may also be susceptible and list the potential conditions under which drives could be lost NOW.

until then, i guess we need to be careful to eject the drive before restarting panther...

 

[///M Power]

Problems with the Lacie update

Whenever I try to open the Lacie updater on my PowerMac G5 it just starts to open the crashes. The Dock starts to make room for the new app, but right away it crashes.

I have redownload the update and I have tried restarting and all the same results.

Very annoying!

Please help!

Thanks!

 

[sober]

firewire 10.3 and 10.3.1

any idea how i can check the version number of my firewire bridge?

i have a new laptop with 10.3 installed. the external drive worked great and then started to get slow. (i might have done a restart with the drive attached...) it was too slow to play video, so i upgraded to 10.3.1. now the drive isn't recognized at all.

trying not to panic, but i don't know how what to do. the patches from lacie don't seem to work. (it just says that there are no valid drives detected. i guess my d2 drive is only 400 not an 800, but don't know how to check.)

if the drive isn't recognized by os x, can i rescue the data off it?

any suggestions are appreciated...

thanks.