Firewire drives keep unmounting

[Sirolway]

I have a dataTale 2-bay Firewire 800 enclosure

It's worked fine for a few years but just recently it's been unmounting; both disks are not visible in the Finder. They are visible in Disk Utility but unmounted. If I click mount, they don't mount

The dataTale is directly attached to a Mac mini which is always on. I typically access the drives over the network from a MBP. The disks are configured as JBOD - no RAID

There's also a FW400 drive daisy chained to the back of the dataTale (i.e. mini > dataTale > FW400) and it stays mounted even when the dataTale drops its drives

What on earth is going on & how can I fix this .. any ideas?

 

[Fishrrman]

"It's worked fine for a few years but just recently it's been unmounting; both disks are not visible in the Finder. They are visible in Disk Utility but unmounted. If I click mount, they don't mount
The dataTale is directly attached to a Mac mini which is always on. I typically access the drives over the network from a MBP. The disks are configured as JBOD - no RAID
There's also a FW400 drive daisy chained to the back of the dataTale (i.e. mini > dataTale > FW400) and it stays mounted even when the dataTale drops its drives
What on earth is going on & how can I fix this .. any ideas?"

The fact that the FW400 drive "stays mounted" would seem to indicated that your cabling is ok, and the FW ports themselves are OK.

This sounds like it could be a
- controller board problem, or perhaps...
- a network problem?

Another suggestion:
Can the dataTale enclosure be opened and dis-assembled?
If so, have you tried..
- opening the enclosure
- disconnecting and then RE-connecting the drives
- put it back together and try again?
Just to be sure that the problem isn't a "weak connection" inside?

If the internal drives are configured as "JBOD" (i.e., not "RAID-ed"), I will _guess_ that the data on them could be accessed by trying the drives in another enclosure (even if one-at-a-time)? Worth a try.

Suggestion:
Get one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
VERY useful (and cheap) peripheral to have around when trying to mount/test/access "bare drives".