Hard Drive Help

[rideahyperLite]

Hey, I have a lacie 200 GB FW 800 external hard drive that is a few years old. When I installed os x 10.3 a few years ago things started to go wrong. For some reason it doesn't mount anymore with firewire 800 and only mounts when I plug it into my firewire 400 port. When I try to mount it using firewire 800 it acts like it is about to mount but then doesn't show up on the desktop. When I open disk utility it says nothing about the drive and when I open system profiler it thinks nothing is connected to my firewire port. For a while I thought that my firewire 800 port was bad; so I just used the 400 port, however, I just tried a new lacie FW 800 drive with my 800 port and it worked fine. So then I started testing things to see if I could get my drive to work. I formated my drive with disk utility (I even wrote zeroes to all the sectors) but still it didn't work. I then plugged in the new HD to my computer via FW 400 and daisy chained the old drive via FW 800 to FW 800 and it worked. This means that the drive's FW800 port must work. However, when I just used the old drive via FW 800 it doesn't work. I haven't tried plugging the drive into another computer's FW 800 because I don't have another one to try. If anyone can help with this that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[kolax]

Sound's like it might be a problem with your FW800 port on your hard drive or the FW800 cable.

Even if the disk doesn't get mounted, the System Profiler will give you information about what is connected to the FW800 port.

Do you have any other FW800 cables you could try? Has the FW800 cable been connected and disconnected a lot from the hard drive / computer?

 

[rideahyperLite]

Thanks for responding. I have actually tried a brand new firewire 800 cable, which I forgot to mention above. Still no luck. It seems that the firewire 800 ports on my computer and on the drive both work because I am able to connect another drive via FW800 and I am also able to daisy chain this drive via FW800 to FW800. So it appears that both ports work but just not together. Is there some reason that they wouldn't work together? Is there a more thoughough way to format the external hard drive? Thanks in advance.