This is a G-4 733 running 10.3.5, with three external FireWire drives chained together and plugged into one of the Mac's FW ports. The drives keep randomly disappearing from the desktop. Sometimes none of them show up on startup, while at other times I might see one, or two. To get the missing one(s) back all I have to do is unplug and replug the cables that chain the drives together, or else the one plugged into the Mac (it IS all right to plug and unplug FireWire cables live, isn't it?), but how come I have to do that?
Messing around with the cables always gets the drives to show up on the desktop again eventually, so it's more of a nuisance than a serious problem, but why is this happening? How can I make all three drives show up and stay put all the time? When I go back and forth between OS-X and OS-9, which I do several times a day, I can never be sure the external FireWire drives will be there after each restart, and there's always the fear that one or more may NOT come back sometime, and all the data on it might be lost.
Anybody got any idea what the heck is going on here?
My best suggestion is to just connect one drive and see if you have any problems in the same time frame. If not then try each drive in turn. If they all work that way then try using two drives connected. If they work then try a different combination of two. See if you can't isolate it to a single problematic drive.
Also how long are your cables?
Yes hot swapping FireWire (or USB) drives is fine. But you always want to dismount the drive before disconnecting it (something that is out of your control in this case).
How are these drives powered? If they are all externally powered it shouldn't be a problem. If some or all are bus powered that might be the source of your problem.
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