MBP won't boot with Firewire 800 drives connected

[Cattywampus_]

Hi,

I bought a new Macbook Pro 2.4GHz couple of weeks ago. Before this I had a RevA MBP (CoreDuo) with a Siig Firewire 800 ExpressCard34. I didn't have this problem on that setup.

Now using the built-in FW800 port on the MBP, when the drives are connected, the computer won't boot. It just hangs on the grey screen with Apple logo.

When I try and boot with the drives connected it boots fine. When the computer has booted I can plug the drives in and they work fine.

Is there a work around for this?

 

[squeeks]

reset the pram (google: resetting PRAM) to make sure it is set to boot from the internal drive by default

 

[e12a]

what is on your external drive? Is it a bootable image or hard drive?

 

[Cattywampus_]

No, no bootable images. There is just data on there.

I tried holding the options key when booting, it allowed me to select the boot volume but then just hung after reading the external drives.

 

[mikestatic]

Fix?

Here is a potential fix:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=4219085