Randomly lost FireWire on my iMac G5..Should I be worried?

[Project Alice]

I booted up my iMac G5 today (20" iSight), and I noticed nothing would respond to be plugged into either of the FW ports. I usually keep an external optical drive plugged into all the time that is not bus powered. I tried different cables and drives, they all would power up but nothing else. System Profiler showed nothing plugged in. Resetting the PRAM did nothing. I reset the SMC and that seems to have fixed it. However now I am worried this might happen again, or something is about to go out.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Try resetting PMU or SMC without them plugged in. That will reset the ports. Report back with results.

 

[Project Alice]

Try resetting PMU or SMC without them plugged in. That will reset the ports. Report back with results.

I reset the SMC earlier and that fixed it.
I was just worried it could be a sign of a worse problem.

 

[eyoungren]

I reset the SMC earlier and that fixed it.
I was just worried it could be a sign of a worse problem.

Last weekend I was futzing with things on my MacPro and suddenly the USB ports stopped working. And I mean ALL of them. Was all set to eBay a new MP when I figured out how to reset the ports.

Some background: The night previous I was copying items from an internal drive to a USB 2.0 drive. I left the operation to run overnight (it was about 800gb). I came down to find a file copy error. So, I tried again, but then decided to abort. When I aborted is when the problems started. Finder became unresponsive, had to reboot and then ran into a prohibitory boot situation. I couldn't select a different drive to boot from because the ports were out.

In my case, I think what happened is that the USB drive enclosure failed during the copy process. Either that or it just overloaded and dropped out. I don't trust it now so it's been disconnected from my system since and I've had no further problems.

I know your issue is FW, but this is a long-winded way of saying the following: check your attached FW devices. From this past experience they can go down and go down hard. If you still trust your optical drive I think the best bet might be to leave it disconnected until you actually need it.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Didn’t Apple have an artnum article about resetting FireWire ports during the PPC era ? I remember reading it and it stated to reset the FireWire ports, just remove the device and reboot computer.

 

[Project Alice]

Last weekend I was futzing with things on my MacPro and suddenly the USB ports stopped working. And I mean ALL of them. Was all set to eBay a new MP when I figured out how to reset the ports.

Some background: The night previous I was copying items from an internal drive to a USB 2.0 drive. I left the operation to run overnight (it was about 800gb). I came down to find a file copy error. So, I tried again, but then decided to abort. When I aborted is when the problems started. Finder became unresponsive, had to reboot and then ran into a prohibitory boot situation. I couldn't select a different drive to boot from because the ports were out.

In my case, I think what happened is that the USB drive enclosure failed during the copy process. Either that or it just overloaded and dropped out. I don't trust it now so it's been disconnected from my system since and I've had no further problems.

I know your issue is FW, but this is a long-winded way of saying the following: check your attached FW devices. From this past experience they can go down and go down hard. If you still trust your optical drive I think the best bet might be to leave it disconnected until you actually need it.

Yeah I try to unplug the power from the optical drive when I'm not using it. I'll make more of a point to do it from now on for sure though. Nothing else seems wrong, and both the ports on the drive still work fine. Unfortunately the thing doesn't have a power switch so it actually needs unplugged.

Lucky you were able to fix it. I once had a USB hub kill everything connected to it, luckilly not the PC it was plugged into. But my best condition Apple Pro Keyboard, a wireless mouse, and a USB flash drive were all lost.

Curious, why even bother copying that much data over USB 2.sl0w? I pretty much avoid USB at all costs if I can, unless it's version 3.x. I've always found USB to be less reliable than FW even if you take out the speed difference equation. Nowadays I do most my file transfer over gigabit ethernet, but if a machine only has 10/100 ethernet I'll use FireWire 400 over USB 1.x or 2.0 any day even if that means taking apart an enclosure.
Also, my "real world" tests conclude that USB 3.0 is no faster, in some cases slower than FireWire 800 when transferring to hard disk. With USB 3.x I've never gotten over 45-50MB/s while FW800 has no problem holding at 60MB/s. GigE trumps them both by a long shot though.
This might be different with SSDs that can actually take advantage of 5Gb+ speeds; but at least for HDDs FW wins in my book...

 

[eyoungren]

Curious, why even bother copying that much data over USB 2.sl0w?

Backups.

I was using that drive as a daily backup drive. The initial clone (I use CCC for this) is long, but once you have those backups there, it's not very long at all and USB 2 doesn't really matter.

The weekly backups and some other manual backups I had on the internal drive, which are on Dropbox were taking up too much space. Since these were dead backups (meaning, the drives or content was not being backed up anymore) I was moving them on to this drive to make space on Dropbox.

I have a 6TB NAS coming today, so this USB drive will remain offline for this purpose.