Anyone having Macbook Firewire issues?

[BBGun]

I have a new black Macbook C2D and was very happy with it for a couple of weeks.... until I noticed that I was having some strange issues with my 3rd-party Firewire drives. I have 2 drives that have been connected to my old G4 for a year or two with no problems. I also bought an AcomData 60GB Ondago drive to use for travel backups, etc.

I daisy-chained all 3 to my MB and began using them right away. Initially, one or another of the drives wouldn't mount on boot. The Finder would display the Disk Unreadable window with the "Initialize", "Ignore", and "Eject" buttons. I would click Ignore or Eject and try again. Eventually, I got it to mount and thought it was just a glitch.

However, after several days, I noticed that some of the files on my AcomData drive would display corrupted data, e.g. a JPEG image would only display half the image and the rest would be garbled or Quicktime videos would be mangled and then Quicktime would quit suddenly.

I attached this drive to a friend's MB C2D and he had no isssues. We tried different cables and different ports on the same drive, and copied the same JPEG files to it multiple times, but still had the same results: crap on my MB; fine on my buddy's MB.

Then I tried using the USB port on the same drive and everything worked fine; no issues at all.

So I tried similar Firewire-connected tests with my other 2 (older) Firewire drives and had no issues at first, but then they started flaking out too. In fact, one drive got so bad, I saw files just disappear from a folder and then the drive wouldn't mount anymore. Now it has directory structure problems I can't fix with Disk Utility.

Has anyone experienced similar issues?

I'm wondering if it's my drive or my MB.

In fact, is it possible for a Firewire drive to hose a Firewire port on a Mac?

Thanks!

 

[mad jew]

Well, is your MacBook plugged into the mains power and does it have plenty of battery power? It's possible that the external drive(s) are sapping too much power.

 

[BBGun]

Well, is your MacBook plugged into the mains power and does it have plenty of battery power? It's possible that the external drive(s) are sapping too much power.

Very good points, but yes, the MB is plugged into power with a full battery charge (usually). In fact, 2 of the 3 firewire drives have their own power supplies and are plugged in too.

At this point, I'm more curious to know if my Firewire drives could be causing any problems because I took my MB back to the Apple store and got it replaced. They were able to duplicate the problem (kinda) after 45 minutes of drive/cable/mac swapping and just replaced it with a new MB. God I love Apple!

So far, my new MB doesn't seem to be having the same problems, but now I'm a bit gunshy about my Firewire drives. I haven't even used the AcomData drive on the new MB yet!

If anyone has any pertinent info, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

 

[mad jew]

So the problems are on the new MacBook, right?

 

[BBGun]

So the problems are on the new MacBook, right?

Sorry, I may have confused the issue.

No, the problems were on the old Macbook. That's why Apple exchanged it for me. The new MB is working fine so far.

And yes, this issue is now somewhat moot. Unless, of course, the problems were caused by one of my Firewire drives or cables. If that's the case, then I don't want to cause any problems with my new MB. That's why I'm still wondering if anyone else has had Firewire problems on their MB or any other Intel Mac for that matter.

Thanks!

 

[mad jew]

Okay, well it's pretty uncommon (downright rare) for a connection such as Firewire or a device such as an external drive to cause you permanent troubles. If that is indeed where the problem is stemming from, unplugging the relevant device should get everything back to how it was before you plugged it in.

In other words, plug your Firewire devices in and see how it goes. At absolute worst, you'll have to go back to Apple and get a replacement. However, I don't think this will be necessary.