Firewire card causing firewire 400 port to blow up

[glsillygili]

So I have a firewire 400 port integrated into an old PCI sound card that I have in my hackintosh and I've plugged my PowerPC macs into before with no problem to image them is disk utility. So today I go to plug in my Powerbook G4. I plug it in and the screen goes crazy and I can smell burning so I quickly unplugged it, guess i'm swapping the logic board on that PB now. My question is how could this happen? This worked fine before and now it destroys the firewire port of any device plugged into it.

Pic of the firewire card in question

 

[glsillygili]

No one? I guess let this be a PSA for you all...

 

[B S Magnet]

So I have a firewire 400 port integrated into an old PCI sound card that I have in my hackintosh and I've plugged my PowerPC macs into before with no problem to image them is disk utility. So today I go to plug in my Mac Mini G4 and I go to put it into target disk mode and It has no power and I can smell that electronics burning smell. I unplug it and the Mac Mini boots up fine now but the firewire port no longer works at all. I found this Mac Mini at the e-recycling so I figured that it might be just a fluke as I have a lot of other problems with this Mac anyway. So I plugged in my G4 PowerBook 12" to see if it would work or not. I plug it in and the screen goes crazy and I can smell burning so I quickly unplugged it, guess i'm swapping the logic board on that PB now. My question is how could this happen? This worked fine before and now it destroys the firewire port of any device plugged into it.
View attachment 907599
Pic of the firewire card in question

Likely a major short on this PCI sound/firewire combo card (probably from past use/ageing).

At this point the findings of two macs and/or their FW buses being potentially damaged/destroyed by it would indicate it’s high time for you to swap out the sound/firewire card on your hackintosh for something a bit more… dedicated and, more importantly, a PCI card which tests OK without using your macs as test subjects. Do you have any old FW enclosures you could try once you replace the PCI card?

Yeah, that might mean getting two PCI cards — one for sound duties, the other for firewire/extra USB. But given how the common denominator in both your tests is this sound card/FW400 combo, it’s a pretty good hedge that you should toss this PCI card into your hazardous waste bin (i.e., not the trash can).

 

[z970]

@glsillygili Out of curiosity, what was the sound card in question?

 

[weckart]

@glsillygili Out of curiosity, what was the sound card in question?

Probably a Creative Audigy of some sort. I have one in a PC and even after installing all of the drivers, the FW port is still looking for a driver, so I suppose it doesn't follow the FW standard. I don't use it and have a combo USB/FW card in for those duties.

 

[z970]

Probably a Creative Audigy of some sort. I have one in a PC and even after installing all of the drivers, the FW port is still looking for a driver, so I suppose it doesn't follow the FW standard. I don't use it and have a combo USB/FW card in for those duties.

That's what I thought.

I've got an Audigy Platinum eX, and I've been really happy with it thus far. I just hope this quirk isn't par for the course for all Audigy cards, or at least the first generation...

 

[TheShortTimer]

Probably a Creative Audigy of some sort. I have one in a PC and even after installing all of the drivers, the FW port is still looking for a driver, so I suppose it doesn't follow the FW standard. I don't use it and have a combo USB/FW card in for those duties.

FireWire is hit and miss in Windows Land, from my experience. I had a Dell Vostro with a mini FW port and even with the drivers pre-loaded from the OEM installation, it only ever managed to interface with my camcorder on one occasion. The camcorder worked fine with my Sawtooth, so I knew that the problem lay with the Vostro and Windows. When I attempted to obtain assistance from Dell, they wanted to charge me around £90 GBP just to go through troubleshooting steps on the phone. I gave the Vostro to a relative and bought a MacBook Pro.

 

[weckart]

In my case, the FW is working absolutely fine - on the separate combo card, that is. The Creative FW port is just having a Greta Garbo moment and just "vants to be alone".

 

[Raging Dufus]

FireWire is hit and miss in Windows Land, from my experience. I had a Dell Vostro with a mini FW port and even with the drivers pre-loaded from the OEM installation, it only ever managed to interface with my camcorder on one occasion. The camcorder worked fine with my Sawtooth, so I knew that the problem lay with the Vostro and Windows. When I attempted to obtain assistance from Dell, they wanted to charge me around £90 GBP just to go through troubleshooting steps on the phone. I gave the Vostro to a relative and bought a MacBook Pro.

HP/Compaq seems to have their act together in this regard. I have an old Compaq tower from 2003 or so running WinXP and has built-in FireWire 400 from headers on the mobo. FireWire ports front and back, works fine and even supports booting. Same with an old 2005-ish HP business laptop. I currently have two HP/C AMD-powered boxes running Linux Mint + Win7 in which I've put FW400 PCI cards, Win & Linux both loaded correct drivers and again everything works. Which all surprised the heck out of me, but it can't just be luck.

 

[jmilan0302]

Electrically, it might not even be firewire. Definitely odd that a sound card would have a firewire port, it's probably used for something else. Or it is just a bad card shorting out anything connected to it.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Electrically, it might not even be firewire. Definitely odd that a sound card would have a firewire port, it's probably used for something else.

Creative produced quite a few with this facility. Here's an Audigy SB0090 that I found on eBay.

Here's a FW equiped Audigy SB0350.

This 2002 review discusses the FW port and why CL included it on their Audigy range.

 

[weckart]

Electrically, it might not even be firewire. Definitely odd that a sound card would have a firewire port, it's probably used for something else. Or it is just a bad card shorting out anything connected to it.

Not odd. Firewire was much more common on Macs than PCs at the time and there were a number of external DAW peripherals that used FW for reduced latency (USB on Windows had horrible latency), so Creative saw it as a selling point to save a PCI slot.

[edit] just noticed that TheShortTimer has a link explaining all.

 

[glsillygili]

Electrically, it might not even be firewire. Definitely odd that a sound card would have a firewire port, it's probably used for something else. Or it is just a bad card shorting out anything connected to it.

I used it many times when it worked under Windows and Mac OS.