firewire disks won't mount

[Gelfin]

I have an external firewire drive and an iPod and suddenly neither of them will mount (PB667, OS X 10.1.5). I have no idea why. I've rebooted. I've zapped my PRAM. There's power coming through the cable, because the iPod is charging and the drives are spinning up. But they won't mount or even get detected on the Firewire bus. The iPod briefly displays the firewire icon on screen as if it's trying to mount up, then reboots and behaves just like it does when I recharge it off AC power. The iPod is not detected in iTunes. Apple System Profiler reports nothing on the firewire port. Other removable disks (i.e. optical disks and my pc-card Memory Stick reader) still mount just fine.

I don't get this. Anybody seen this? Have any ideas? I need a short firewire cable anyway, so I'll probably pick one up over lunch to see if maybe the cable's gone bad, but I'm doubtful that's the problem.

 

[shadowfax0]

This is not going to be as helpful as you hoped, but it's all I can think of...make sure there's no gunk in the cable head, like the top two pins inf a FW cable are power, and the bottom four are for info, make sure they aren't gooked up or corroded or anything, that's all I can think of...hope it works out...

 

[jaykk]

I had same problem with my PB 550

I had exactly the same problem with my PB 550 Mhz .. i had an ipod and an external firewire drive enclosure.. i took it to the Apple Store, the guy there tried with different cables and drive. All the drives are getting charged, but won't mount..so they had to sent it to service center to replace my firewire device on PB...but luckily i got it back within 4 days..

i guess my external enclosure killed my firewire device. i heard that about some reports on failure of firewire device caused by ipod as well..

 

[Gelfin]

*sigh*

There's a very long thread about exactly this issue on Apple's support discussion board for USB and Firewire issues on the PBG4. I guess I should have looked there first, but apparently this is a problem that has been happening to people from day one. The thread goes back over a year and has been building steadily since then. No Apple rep has ever posted to the thread, and the people who have had it fixed have had to get the logic boards on their PBs replaced, and many of those have reported that the problem has happened again within a few weeks.

Frustrating. Really, really frustrating.

 

[stromie952]

Tell me about it.

I had a similar problem on my iBook and I as well had to have my logic board replaced. But, my return took like 2 or 3 weeks

It was pretty painful for a while there, but I survived.