Mmmmm-hmmmmmm.....been following this one quietly, now going to add.... Over the Christmas holiday weekend while my BF was here, I shut down my G4 867 Quicksilver and my USB/Firewire external HD (40 GB drive in a LaCie enclosure), so he could put the original NVIDIA GeForce2 MX video card back in and hook up a second monitor on it (not to mention a major area cleanup-desk reorganization and reworking the "spaghetti"). While all that was successful, when it was all done and I powered everything back up, the external HD, which had always been Firewired to the G4, "disappeared." That is, it didn't show up on the desktop, and the G4 didn't know it was there in either Disk Utility or ASP).
Important Note -- Immediately prior to shutting down and starting this, I had updated my backups to the external HD over Firewire, and all was well with it. This sounds like the OP's issue -- his FW drive was working fine until he shut down, but when rebooting, he lost it, which is why this thread got my attention. Second Important Note -- Although the Firewire is down on this drive, the drive comes up perfectly well with USB -- on the desktop, in Disk Utility and in ASP -- so I can still use it even though USB is suboptimal compared to the Firewire -- and is completely usable as well as visible on the desktop. Firewire Experiment after USB showed that the HD itself was good and I could still make backups and transfer data albeit horribly slowly: I only had the one FW cable, so we tried switching FW ports in the G4. No go -- it didn't matter which port we used; the drive only showed up when we plugged it back in with USB. My BF said this meant it could be a problem with either the cable OR the FW port on the external drive case. He said he'd take my cable home and test it on his system (he also has an external USB/Firewire drive), and if it failed, next time he came down, he'd bring another FW cable (a known working good), and we'd try it on mine, but this time, he said, if it didn't work, it would mean the FW port on my enclosure was bad. Alas, I didn't even THINK to try my FW cable with the iBook (and my brain death gets even worse!), but it seems my cable was bad anyway at his house. Sooo, for his next visit... He showed up over Valentine's weekend with a working FW cable he had just used himself on his own equipment and, just in case, a four port USB hub. No go on the FW with my machine, in either port -- which means I have no more Firewire unless or until I get another enclosure. And the worse part of the brain death - AGAIN it didn't occur to me to think of the iBook. If only I had, it wouldn't have taken me two days and two nights to do a massive data transfer to the iBook totally with USB flash drives. I'd have done my iBook nuke-and-pave while he was here with the good FW cable and moved all the stuff into the iBook straight out of the G4 with FW Target Disk Mode! Thank goodness for the USB hub though -- at least now I can have my external HD and BOTH flash drives plugged in simultaneously when needed. That helps a little anyway... But anyway -- how in the heck is it possible that just shutting down could have killed the FW port in my enclosure? I never dropped my external HD or spilled anything on it and when I used to move data from it into the iBook, I would simply unplug the end that was in the G4's FW port and plug it into the iBook's FW port...so other than the initial plugging in (first week of Aug 2007 when I got it), I had never even touched the enclosure's FW port! Even when we disconnected it from the G4 after the shutdown (to be able to rearrange the area and get inside the G4 to make it run the second monitor), we did it from the G4's end. :::::sigh::::: ~Yersinia. ________ "Never accept a drink from a urologist." --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
