PowerMac G4 Firewire Bus Has Died.

[richardallan]

I was just doing a backup to a Firewire drive on my old G4 Mac, which went fine. Unplugged the drive & plugged another drive in - nothing! The drives are fine. Looks like the bus has died all of a sudden. This seems a bit strange as I have never heard of a Firewire bus dying before. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[AlixSPQR]

Perhaps a PMU Reset will help. But be careful with that axe, Eugene.

 

[swamprock]

Perhaps a PMU Reset will help. But be careful with that axe, Eugene.

Yep, and everything is green and sub-marine.

 

[Wild Hare]

Only one FW port on your G4? Some have two (or more / one inside).
Occasionally one will fail while others still may work. (Hopefully)

And while FW is supposedly hot swappable, I now avoid that whenever possible
“out of an abundance of caution” with the older G4 machines.

 

[richardallan]

It has 2 Firewire ports on the back. Neither is working. I will try a PMU reset tomorrow. I never hot swap my Firewire devices.

 

[evanboonie]

I had one of the FireWire ports on my cube give up the ghost once. Turns out it was because a small ferrite bead near the connector had burnt itself up. If the PMU reset doesn't work, it might be worth checking for anything that looks burnt around the ports. These little ferrite beads are easy to replace if they do burn up. You could probably even get away with nothing more than a solder blob across its old traces. The ferrites are just there for a bit of power filtering that all but the most sensitive devices should function without.

 

[ojfd]

Read the first post here:
Dead FireWire

 

[ak-78]

Back in the 2008 I was pulling FireWire 410 out of my 867 MHz PB 12" and firewire port went in smokes. After disassembly I found next to port itself, one burnt controller chip for IEEE 1394 Port. Perhaps your two ports are sitting on one controller chip, look behind ports itself on MoBo.