macbook crashes w/leopard update...

[John1111]

basic problem:
after upgrading to leopard, my 2007 macbook (specs below) crashes when i hook up firewire drives.

the story...
My off-warranty macbook is crashing every time I hook up either one of my firewire drives (80gb lacie and 500gb wd). The ironic thing is that I just had an apple store "genius" look at it because it was crashing randomly (not in relationship to firewire drives). He suggested doing a clean install of leopard. I purchased leopard, backed up everything onto my 500gb firewire drive, installed leopard and then plugged the fw drive in to restore data and it instantly froze. i let it sit, hoping to see a spinning beach ball and then on with the show. nothing... i had to power down, restart and then it wouldn't re-boot (froze in mid-boot). i had to power down again and unplug the fw drive and only then would it fully boot (no problems or delay). I actually re-installed leopard (clean - erase/install) again just in case that was the issue. same problem. argh...

Any and all advice would be very much appreciated - thank you!

2007 macbook w/leopard 10.5.3
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MB21.00A5.B07
SMC Version: 1.17f0

 

[tersono]

I'm afraid that you may have a problem with the firewire interface on your computer, i.e. a hardware fault. It could possibly be a problem with the external drives, but as you're experiencing the same issue with both of them, it seems unlikely that two drives would fail at the same time.

 

[John1111]

thanks for your help and the diagnosis!
that's quite a bummer - is it fixable?
any idea how much it might cost (gulp...)