G5 suddenly quit recognizing firewire drive and it's not the drive.

[amberashby]

All of a sudden (while I had it mounted) my external firewire drive lost connection with my computer. I've rebooted several times and unplugged and plugged it back in. Sometimes it will recognize it for a brief while and allow me to use it then all of a sudden it disconnects. Other times I can't get it to see it at all.

What's strange is that it works perfectly fine on my iBook.

I've tried it on the G5 under a different (clean) user, but same result.

Any ideas??????????

Thanks.

 

[amberashby]

It's working again!!!

I found something on Apple's website that suggested I unplug the computer for 5 minutes. Didn't think it would work, but it did!!!!

 

[amberashby]

Never-mind. Spoke too soon. I tried transferring a 17-gig file and it was transferring super slow and now it stopped.

 

[Sedulous]

Try repairing the drive on a different computer. This has solved a similar problem in the past.

 

[amberashby]

That didn't work either.

I don't know what to do. I may call Apple.

It works perfectly on the iBook and had worked perfectly on the G5 until just recently.

Any more ideas?

 

[.a]

... i have kind of the same problem with my g4 dual 450 (4 years old) running panther.
twice in a month my two external firewirde drives aren't recognized ... they just do not mount ... i have no idea why this happens.
i use my mac every day 8 hours up to 18 hours (depends on the work to do
.a

 

[amberashby]

So what do you do to get them working again?

 

[Sweetfeld28]

just happened to me too.

This same thing happen to me while i was using CarbonCopy. I was creating a backup of my protable firewire drive on to my 450 DP's internal 80GB drive. For some unknown reason the desktop icon disappeared. After, being unable to fix it, i had to use the disk utlitiy to format it. Now, it sees it fine.

Hopefully, you won't have to do this.
Good Luck.

 

[amberashby]

I had already tried reformatting the drive and that didn't work.

I ended up having to re-install the OS. Everything seems fine now. Hope this doesn't happen again.